Decline and fall of scripting languages ?

[Donn Cave]

In article <7x8xzcck9d.fsf at ruckus.brouhaha.com>,
 Paul Rubin <http://phr.cx@NOSPAM.invalid> wrote:
...
> I notice that Haskell strings are character lists, i.e. at least
> conceptually, "hello" takes the equivalent of five cons cells.  Do
> real implementations (i.e. GHC) actually work like that?  If so, that's
> enough to kill the whole thing right there.

Yep.  There is a separate packed string type.

> > Objective CAML is indeed not a pure functional language.
> 
> Should that bother me?  I should say, my interest in Ocaml or Haskell
> is not just to try out something new, but also as a step up from both
> Python and C/C++ for writing practical code.  That is, I'm looking for
> something with good abstraction (unlike Java) and type safety (unlike
> C/C++), but for the goal of writing high performance code (like
> C/C++).  I'm even (gasp) thinking of checking out Ada.

It's up to you, I'm just saying.  Speaking of C++, would
you start someone with Python or Java for their first OOPL?
Kind of the same idea.

   Donn Cave, donn at u.washington.edu