Re: What's so cool about Scheme?

[Matt Hellige <address@hidden>]

[Jan-Willem Maessen <jmaessen@mit.edu>]
> "Bayley, Alistair" <Alistair_Bayley@ldn.invesco.com> writes:
> > You can classify functional languages as pure/impure, lazy/eager. You tend
> > to find that the lazy languages (Haskell, Clean, Miranda) are pure, and
> > impure languages (Lisp, Scheme, ML) are eager. There's no reason you can't
> > have a pure eager language, but I can't think of one (anybody?). 
> 
> Laziness appears to give back some of the power we give up due to lack
> of side effects.  There are programs which have a strictly worse time
> complexity when written in a pure, eager language as compaared to a
> pure, lazy language.  More details in this paper (I believe):
> 

Yes, and see also Chris Okasaki's excellent book "Purely Functional
Data Structures".

Matt

-- 
Matt Hellige                  matt@immute.net
http://matt.immute.net