Fwd: [Haskell-cafe] Haskell for Physicists

[Khudyakov Alexey]

В сообщении от 30 сентября 2009 23:42:57 Casey Hawthorne написал:
> On Wed, 30 Sep 2009 21:24:11 +0200, you wrote:
> >I?m a physicist, so I think they would be attracted by something like
> >
> >Haskell: high level physics modelling  at  Fortran speeds
> >
> >Haskell: mathematics beyond numerical calculus
> 
> And,
> easier to make use of multi-core machines than threaded Fortran.
> 
Yes this is good selling point. Fortran (and C++ too) programs heavily rely on 
global state. And thus are very difficult to parallelize. Frequently only  
possibility is process-level parallelism. This however has problems too.


> I suppose one could have a Haskell parser convert Fortran to monadal
> code.
> 
> Then, a parser to convert, hopefully, most of the resulting code to
> pure code.
> 
This is interesting but very challenging task. Conversion fortran-> monadic 
code is trade of one mess for another. Since local state and global state are 
ubiquitous it's difficult to factor out pure functions. Another problem is that 
fortran functions are usually BIG.

Most likely this will require manual intervention.