[Haskell-cafe] Why?

Richard O'Keefe ok at cs.otago.ac.nz
Thu Dec 10 19:28:10 EST 2009


On Dec 9, 2009, at 4:00 AM, Robin Green wrote:

> At Thu, 10 Dec 2009 12:07:32 +0000,
> Magnus Therning wrote:
>> As I understand it it all started with laziness.  I don't know if
>> laziness is impossible without purity
>
> More or less.

The S programming language, used for statistics,
- is not pure
- DOES have lazy evaluation of arguments.

(For a free version, see www.r-project.org.)

I suspect that the original motivation for this was so that
plot(temperature, pressure)
could automatically get "temperature" on the horizontal axis
and "pressure" on the vertical axis, but it is also used as
a lazy evaluation mechanism.

In practice, a lot of S code is close to functional.

>



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