>> But alas, it's not purely functional,
> 
> Yeah. I don't think you could get a real distributed language with 
> everything being truly functional, could you?

Um... why?

> I mean, what's the functional equivalent of "the machine 
> running the calculation just burst into flames"? :-)

Throwing an exception, as a guess. Like a division by zero error, but 
less deterministic. (??!?!) ;-)

> What's the 
> functional equivalent of "we've just released a new version of this 
> function"?

Now that's an interesting question...

>> and the general style just seemed untidy and complicated. It's just 
>> not my cup of tea...
> 
> Yep. Altho the language itself seems pretty simple and straightforward, 

If by "simple and straight forward" you mean "assumes referential 
transparency but doesn't actually enforce it or make any attempt to 
check that it's there", then sure. Go knock yourself out. ;-)

> the infrastructure used to support installs and reliability and such is 
> pretty dense. Lots of forward references to stuff I haven't read yet, 
> and I haven't yet found the roadmap to the right order to read things 
> in. :-)

Gotta love documentation where you can't figure out what order to read 
it in...

OTOH, try just *finding* a good reference for Haskell for beginners...!

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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