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

[Graham Klyne]

At 10:55 28/09/04 +0100, Malcolm Wallace wrote:
>Keith Wansbrough <Keith.Wansbrough at cl.cam.ac.uk> writes:
>
> >           I can't believe that a simple "wc" implementation should be
> > 570 times slower in Haskell than OCaml - could someone investigate and
> > fix the test?
>
>With code like this, I'm not surprised!
>
>     main = do file <- getContents
>               putStrLn $ show (length $ lines file) ++ " " ++
>                          show (length $ words file) ++ " " ++
>                          show (length file)
>
>Space-leak or what?

Er, please excuse a dumb question, but I'm struggling to see the problem here.

I can see that this requires the original file to be kept for 3-time 
scanning,  so enough memory for the entire file will be required.  Is that 
*the* problem to which you allude?  I can't see any other problem 
here.  And why would this put Haskell at a disadvantage?

#g


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Graham Klyne
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