Clean<->OCaml?
Rainer Joswig
> Now I am in a crisis. Should I really spend time in learning Clean or
> should I get the Ada 83 compiler and learn Ada. The concept of clean is
> very good, concerning the platform intependence. Or should I rely on IDL
>
> and Fortran 90? Or should I learn Sisal ?
Look at Macintosh Common Lisp.
Gregory Baker
> For private I use an Apple Macintosh, and it is nearly impossible to get
>
> Now I am in a crisis. Should I really spend time in learning Clean or
> should I get the Ada 83 compiler and learn Ada. The concept of clean is
> very good, concerning the platform intependence. Or should I rely on IDL
>
> and Fortran 90? Or should I learn Sisal ?
>
From experience, you'd be crazy to be doing advanced scientific
programming in anything _other_ than a functional language. I know
because I spent quite a lot of time at CSIRO (Australian Research
Organisation) doing both. We even did a little benchmark comparison
on some geophysics stuff where we tortured a vacation student into
doing some comparative programming for us.
The simplicity of expression, and the low bug counts of the functional
language implementations *blitzed* Fortran programs we had spent several
years refining beforehand.
Sisal performance is excellent, BUT...AFAIK there is only an interpreted
version for Mac.
I love Ada, I think it's a gem, but it won't help you very much in
doing scientific work. The best that can be said about it is that it
won't hinder you as much as many of the other imperative languages, and
your programs are likely to be correct.
Clean had some early compiler bugs which bit me, but I would expect they
would mostly be cleaned out by now. It's good. It won't take very long to
learn and the translation from Ocaml -> Clean will be pretty straightforward.
It depends on how heavily you used side effects in your Ocaml code; they
turn into adding an extra Unique type argument into your function headers.
I've done translations Clean -> Ocaml at a fairly rapid rate (2000 lines
in a week by hand), I don't think there'll be much trouble going the other
way.
I have run Clean 1.0 on a Mac SE/30 with 2MB ram. It was a bit painful;
if you've got enough memory I wouldn't expect much of a problem. It
produces quite efficient code.
On the other hand... if you don't mind using Unix, try out one of the
free Unix flavours on your Mac. If it's m68k based, OpenBSD works quite
well - I've got Ocaml on mine (no native code, but it should not be too
hard to get working), Sisal should be no problem. If your Mac is PowerPC
based, then there are very swish Linux distributions available. Sisal would
run fine on that.
> What do you think about that?
>
Download Clean, learn it, have a play with it. It won't be very hard.
> With greetings,
> Siegfried Gonzi
Regards,
Greg Baker -- gba...@postgrad.mq.edu.au -- greg....@aptec.net.au
www.ics.mq.edu.au/~gregb
Fernando Mato Mira
siegfri...@kfunigraz.ac.at wrote:
> programming language is something like Prolog. And they think functional
> programming only is a good choice for "artificial intelligence".
Show them the abstract for "A FFT Compiler" at: