Decline and fall of scripting languages ?

[Paul Rubin]

Donn Cave <donn at u.washington.edu> writes:
> > I'm not sure what you mean by that about OCAML.  That its functional
> > model is not pure enough?  I'd like to look at Haskell as well, but I
> > have the impression that its implementation is not as serious as
> > OCaml's, i.e. no native-code compiler.
> 
> On the contrary, there are a couple.  Ghc is probably the leading
> implementation these days, and by any reasonable measure, it is serious.

OK, I've looked at the Haskell "gentle introduction" page a little bit
and it's nice.  I do remember Ocaml beating Haskell on a performance
shootout and am not sure whether Ghc was used for the Haskell entry.

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.

> 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.