On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 8:41 AM, Rustom Mody <rustompm...@gmail.com> wrote: > "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?
I'm not Vincent, but: The sat() operation is by definition in inefficient, regardless of language? Cheers, Chris -- http://blog.rebertia.com -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
