nemesis wrote:

> yes, when a guy like Tim speaks, developers of toolsets should hear.  It's a
> good thing that a well-known developer of high profile titles is aware of
> functional programming and Haskell and demanding C++-alike tool developers to
> provide similar features, like guards and comprehensions...
> 
> much of the problems he lists as plagues in the Unreal code have to do exactly
> with null pointer deferencing and out-of-bounds arrays, situations which have
> no parallel in Haskell...

I just find it interesting to see Haskell (which everybody thinks of as 
"slow") and games programming (which everybody thinks of as 
"speed-critical") in the same document... ;-)

In fairness, Haskell has not (yet) evolved to the point where array 
index exceptions can be avoided. (Not by compile-time checking anyway.) 
Admittedly, it's a little less serious than the C case (i.e., your 
program instantly stops with an eror message rather than randomly 
corrupting memory), but that's still not ideal.

Arguably partial functions are the Haskell equivilent of null pointer 
issues - as exemplified by "head []". If your code produces this 
exception, good luck working out what the problem is. ;-)

I've said it before and I'll say it again - people would probably take 
Haskell a lot more seriously if there were big applications written with 
it. (The Haskell compiler almost certainly doesn't count.)

Post a reply to this message