Re: [Caml-list] Purity and lazyness

["Holger Weiß" <holger@cis.fu-berlin.de>]

* David Rajchenbach-Teller <David.Teller@univ-orleans.fr> [2011-01-07 17:38]:
> Correct me if I'm wrong, but I wouldn't classify Erlang as "pure":
> sending and receiving messages -- which are two of the most important
> primitives in Erlang -- are definitely side-effects.
> Also, asynchronous error-checking, Mnesia, etc. look quite impure to me.

Indeed.  Erlang uses single assignment, but it doesn't enforce
referential transparency.

> I also vaguely remember Simon Peyton-Jones declaring something along the
> lines of "The next Haskell will be strict".

Not really:

| Any successor language [to Haskell] will have support for both strict and lazy
| functions.  So the question then is: what's the default, and how easy is it to
| get to these things?  How do you mix them together?  So it isn't kind of a
| completely either/or situation any more.  But on balance yes, I'm definitely
| very happy with using the lazy approach, as that's what made Haskell what it is
| and kept it pure.

[ http://www.techworld.com.au/article/261007/a-z_programming_languages_haskell/?pp=7 ]

Holger