On Fri, 4 Dec 1998, Fergus Henderson wrote:
...
> I think your understanding is gravely mistaken.
>
> The intent, I believe, is that Haskell Arrays should be
> implemented as contiguous memory, at least for optimizing compilers.
> Implementations using association lists would IMHO only be
> suitable only for non-optimizing compilers.
>
Well, this was only my understanding and was qualified as
one of the things that were not clear to me. I still
have my doubts and I would really like to find some
authoritative answer instead of heresays about slugishness
of Haskell arrays that I see here and there on the net.
See for example, "Implementing the conjugate gradient
algorithm" by P.R. Serrarens, http://www.cs.kun.nl/~pascalrs/
He very definitely dismisses Haskell arrays as unsuitable for
scientific computations. He used GHC - optimized compiler
after all. On the other hand, he speaks highly of Haskell lists.
Which prompted me to do my little tests in Hugs. Also favouring
the lists..
Jan
