--- bryan wrote:
While XSLT is considered to be a functional language by experts in
this
field, it is definitely not a very nice representative of this class
of
programming languages.
OOOOH that's a baaad thing you said. :)
I'm just quoting Phil Wadler, who recently (at the School of Advanced
FP in Oxford, England, August) in his lecture about XQuery said that
"XSLT is probably the most used functional language and the ugliest
one".
Anyway, it seems to me that you prefer Haskell out of the various
functional languages, do you have a particular reason for this? I
have
problems with Haskell, I've tried and I've tried but it's frankly
quite
hard for me to follow programs written in Haskell once they get
beyond
a
couple pages when printed, for functional languages I prefer Lisp and
Erlang. Especially Erlang.
So anyway what do you like especially about Haskell?
Strong typing, polymorphic types, type classes
Higher order functions
Huge expressiveness
Lazy evaluation + pattern matching
The (built-in support for the) very precise (monadic) approach to
encapsulating operations with side effects.
They even joke that once you have specified the types correctly, then
the solution just starts working... :o) and in reality quite often
this is really the case.
But I'm not comparing Haskell to other languages, just saying that I
like it.
=====
Cheers,
Dimitre Novatchev.
http://fxsl.sourceforge.net/ -- the home of FXSL
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