Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!samsung!usc!ucsd!ucbvax!cs.hull.ac.uk!rst
From: rst@cs.hull.ac.uk (Rob Turner)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.functional
Subject: Re: Miranda FTP sites
Message-ID: <7113.9101141308@olympus.cs.hull.ac.uk>
Date: 14 Jan 91 13:08:50 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Lines: 27

Bill Kinnersley writes (about Miranda (TM :-)):

>Other than being lazily evaluated, what sets it apart?

Good question. I would assume you believe there are some wonderful
facilities in Miranda which just *cannot* be obtained in any of the
public domain functional languages. Never having used Miranda (TM),
but after reading lots about it in various books, I conclude that
there is nothing to set Miranda (TM) apart from languages such as SML
and Haskell. The people at Research Software Ltd *must* believe that
they have a unique language, there is no other explanation for their
reason to charge people for it. Maybe it runs a lot faster than SML
and Haskell, although I find this hard to believe as it has lazy
semantics.

Of course there is the argument of support and maintenance, which is
better provided for in commercial products. But are there really lots
of people using Miranda for large scale projects which depend
critically on a first class support (and who can't program their way
around any bugs :-))?

I would like to discover just how many copies of Miranda (TM) have
been sold. It would make interesting reading. Better still, what are
the figures for the number of users of all "modern" functional
languages, e.g. SML, Haskell, Miranda (TM), Hope, Orwell.

Rob