Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!njin!fdurt1!wisdom!tronsbox!dfrancis
From: dfrancis@tronsbox.xei.com (Dennis Heffernan)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.programmer
Subject: Re: Functional Programming (Re: Good programmers and assembly language)
Message-ID: <1529@tronsbox.xei.com>
Date: 9 Apr 91 04:14:49 GMT
References: <7214@harrier.ukc.ac.uk> <1523@tronsbox.xei.com> <7235@harrier.ukc.ac.uk>
Organization: Romantic Encounters BBS
Lines: 50

In article <7235@harrier.ukc.ac.uk> mr3@ukc.ac.uk (M.Rizzo) writes:
|I think you've made a very hasty comment there. You are obviously put
|off by the notation and confused by the totally different approach to
|imperative programming languages such as C that most people are
|used to.

	That's not a hasty comment; that's one based on all the code I've seen
from such wonderful languages as C, C++ and SmallTalk that look like line noise.
I'd rather learn assembly than spend my life pondering strings of non-
alphanumeric symbols.

|
|But if you know how the quick sort algorithm works (you'll find this in
|any decent algorithms book) you should be able to understand those
|three lines if you think about it. They're almost a specification of
|quick sort rather than an implementation !  Familiarity with set and
|function notation in Mathematics is also very useful. Just to help you
|along if you want to understand it better:
|
[...]
|The third line is obviously using recursion. In my opinion this line
|captures the essence of the quick sort algorithm very elegantly. Again
|think of how many PASCAL or C statements you'd need to implement
|quicksort (more the so for assembler).

	Don't care how many lines it takes.  If there was a language with the
power of C or assembler and the readability of Cobol, I'd marry it.  As it
stands, anything I write other than rexx scripts gets either flow charted or
psudo-coded first, and THEN I worry about the assembler code.  It'd be 
pointless for me to go through all that and then put all the real code on 
three lines.  

|I can assure you that languages such as Miranda, Hope and ML, do
|provide significant advantages over traditional programming languages.
|Their authors have analyzed the shortcomings of traditional languages
|and written new ones to overcome them. A very good introduction to
|such languages is given in "An Introduction to Functional Programming"
|by Bird & Wadler (published by Prentice-Hall) for anyone who's interested.
|Increasingly more universities are including functional programming in
|their undergraduate courses - there are even opinions that a functional
|language should replace Pascal as the traditional first language taught
|at university.

	The book review collumn in the current Byte covers some books that
take the opposite stance.

dfrancis@tronsbox.xei.com   ...uunet!tronsbox!dfrancis     GEnie: D.HEFFERNAN1
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"Using C will definitely cut your life expectancy by 10 years or more."
	--Carl Sassenrath, GURU'S GUIDE TO THE COMMODORE AMIGA #1