[Haskell-cafe] What's the deal with Clean?

[Jason Dagit]

On Thu, Nov 5, 2009 at 6:15 PM, brian <briand at aracnet.com> wrote:

>
> On Nov 5, 2009, at 8:26 AM, Jason Dagit wrote:
>
>
>>
>> Haskell knows when I have a list of Doubles, you know, because it's
>> strongly typed.
>>
>> Then it proceeds to box them. Huh ?
>>
>> Imagine a computation which will yield a Double if evaluated, but has not
>> yet been evaluated.   How do you store that in the list?
>>
>>
> So laziness is causing the boxing to be necessary ?
>
>
"Necessary" is a strong word within formal/mathematical communities.  If you
mean it in that sense, then I'm not sure it's necessary.  My (incomplete)
understanding is that no one has a better way than boxing that has as wide
applicability as boxing.  Perhaps there are techniques that work better.  My
guess is that they are either 1) special cases; or 2) have yet to be
discovered.  I wonder if perhaps supercompilation or perhaps whole program
optimizations will eventually be able to eliminate much of the boxing we
have today.  Strictness analysis has done a lot to remove boxing but it is
not perfect due to the halting problem.

Jason
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