Paul Hudak writes:
| Being an old fart, I was around when most of this happened, and will
| humbly share at least some of the "blame" for this. But in our defense,
| this was at the time when there was no "standard" FL and we were trying
| to establish Haskell as such a candidate -- and not selfishly, but for
| the good of the community, which outsiders viewed as being fragmented
| and lacking in terms of a standard language. We encouraged the SISAL
| folks to at least use a subset of Haskell for SISAL, but they did not
| want to do this -- my strong impression was that they wanted to mark out
| their own turf. In hindsight both groups should have supported each
| other more, but hindsight is always 20-20.
Let me clarify (or perhaps muddle) this just a little. Since I am also
an old fart, however, my memory may be faulty. ;-)
When we started work on Haskell, Standard ML and Sisal were already in
existence. We were not trying to define a universal standard for
functional programming, but rather, a standard pure, nonstrict, higher-
order, polymorphically-typed functional language. The objective was
to help focus the work of researchers working with languages like
Lazy ML, Orwell, Miranda, Ponder, and several others. That Sisal
(strict, first-order, monomorphically-typed) did not fall into this
category by no means meant that anyone "looked down his nose" at it.
Actually, I think we were originally thinking of laziness, rather
than nonstrictness, and weren't considering languages like Id as
part of our domain, but Arvind and Nikhil (quite correctly) convinced
us that the semantic distinction of strictness versus nonstrictness
should be our concern, rather than the operational notions of
eagerness and laziness. They then joined our effort. Sisal, appropriately
I think, remained outside of our domain. As Paul says, there was
later an attempt to get together with Sisal folks to the extent of
emphasizing what we had had in common as much as how we differed
by using some common syntax. It's too bad this didn't work out.
Sisal is great stuff. These folks unquestionably succeeded in their
objective of beating Fortran at its own game. That the funding for
it eventually dried up should not detract from this accomplishment.
Cheers,
--Joe
Joseph H. Fasel, Ph.D. email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Technology Modeling and Analysis phone: +1 505 667 7158
University of California fax: +1 505 667 2960
Los Alamos National Laboratory postal: TSA-7 MS F609
Los Alamos, NM 87545
