[Haskell-cafe] Re: OCaml list sees abysmal Language Shootout results

Adrian Hey ahey at iee.org
Thu Oct 7 12:34:19 EDT 2004


On Thursday 07 Oct 2004 3:29 pm, Andrew Butterfield wrote:
> At 03:08 PM 07/10/2004 +0100, MR K P SCHUPKE wrote:
> >I though clean was always strict, and that was the major difference
> >between clean and haskell (that and the fact clean is a proprietry
> > language)
>
> No - Clean is pure and lazy like Haskell,
> - the key difference is that it uses
> uniqueness types rather than monads to ensure the I/O is referentially
> transparent and safe.

(At the risk of getting way out of my depth:-) I would say another important
difference is that the languages semantics are defined directly in terms
of graph re-writing, rather than lambda calculus. Not that I really understand 
anything about formal semantics, but IMO from a programmers perspective this
is good thing because it allows programmers better control of sharing and to
distinguish between constants (CAFs) and "functions which take no arguments"
(both concepts being semantically meaningless in lambda calculus AFAIK). 

Regards
--
Adrian Hey


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