[Haskell-cafe] Data.IArray rant

[Andrew Coppin]

>> It's rather that some considered the IArray API to be
>> inadequate most of the time. Really, H98 arrays aren't very
>> good at anything they do. For collective operations, you are
>> supposed to convert the array to a list, work on the list and
>> then convert it back to an array which just seems wrong.
>
> I am unconvinded that this is any more wrong than using a for
> loop in an imperative language. Remember that the lists are
> lazy, so it’s misleading to say “convert the array to a list”
> since what happens most of the time is that elements are taken
> out of the array and passed to the processing function and then
> thrown away before the next element is processed.

You're still needlessly allocating and then garbage collecting memory 
though.

My personal feeling is that Haskell programmers use lists a lot when 
what they really want are "streams" (in the sense of the stream-fusion 
library). I don't want you to actually *make* a physical list, I just 
want to abstract over something that sequentially generates data.

But then, lists are in the standard Prelude, and hard-wired into the 
language syntax. Streams aren't exposed by any moderately standard 
library. Even the stream-fusion library treats streams as a sort of 
"under the covers" thing to deforest lists. My humble opinion is that 
half the time when people create physical lists, what they really mean 
is a data pipeline that doesn't need to physically materialise at all.

But anyway... Haskell '98 arrays may have fancy indexing, but I've 
always wished that there had been a plain ordinary integer-indexed array 
construct, with the fancy indexing implemented on top of that, so your 
use of fancy indexing is /optional/. I get the distinct impression that 
the default array libraries are so barren just because nobody really 
used them much, and that was then and this is now, and it's a major pain 
to break something that so much code is written against...

I just hope we don't end up with a bazillion different array 
implementations popping up. But we'll see.