"Language L is (in)efficient. No! Only implementations are (in)efficient"
I am reminded of a personal anecdote. It happened about 20 years ago but is still fresh and this thread reminds me of it. I was attending some workshop on theoretical computer science. I gave a talk on Haskell. I showed off all the good-stuff -- pattern matching, lazy lists, infinite data structures, etc etc. Somebody asked me: Isnt all this very inefficient? Now at that time I was a strong adherent of the Dijkstra-religion and this viewpoint "efficiency has nothing to do with languages, only implementations" traces to him. So I quoted that. Slowing the venerable P S Thiagarajan got up and asked me: Lets say that I have a language with a type 'Proposition' And I have an operation on proposition called sat [ sat(p) returns true if p is satisfiable]... I wont complete the tale other than to say that Ive never had the wind in my sails taken out so completely! So Vincent? I wonder what you would have said in my place? -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
