Paul Mackinney wrote:
> Heh, me too! (Although likely on a more modest scale) I've just finished
> a Programming Languages course where we used Haskell to write a lambda
> calculus evaluator. Writing the input expressions as structures (Lambda
> "x" (Var "y")) was so irritating that I wrote a parser to field string
> input ("/x.y"). It works nicely, although only the interpreter's
> built-in limits keep it from blowing up on expressions that expand
> infinitely.
Haskell is nice for what it is, but I wouldn't really call it a
practical language, simply because, last time I checked, performance
wasn't very good, and it didn't have much in the way of libraries. But
it is very elegant syntactically.
Erlang (http://www.erlang.org) is, I think, a better choice for real
work. It is also a functional language, but with built-in concurrency
using asynchronous messages to pass data between processes which may
live on the same machine or on other machines reachable via a network.
Ericsson has used it in a number of significant projects, including a
high-performnance ATM router the model number of which I no longer
recall.
> Not sure about licensing, but it's small, free, and available for *nix,
> MacOS, and Wintel. http://haskell.org
Erlang is not only free software, but it's already packaged for Debian
(though I think it's been orphaned; it's in stable, but no longer in
testing or unstable).
Craig
Attachment:
pgpQm6dW1gvi9.pgp
Description: PGP signature