ignore this one

[alexr_rwx]

From Paulson's ML for the Working Programmer:

The product of a list of integers can be computed like this:

fun prod ns = if null ns then 1 else (hd ns) * (prod (tl ns));

If you prefer this version of prod, you might as well give up ML for Lisp. For added clarity, Lisp primitives have names like CAR and CDR. Normal people find pattern-matching more readable than hd and tl.

*laughs* I guess I'd better give up ML for LISP, then, because that's exactly how I'd do it. I'm sure that ML is, uh, lovely when you get to know it (perhaps analogous to "I'm sure that deep down inside, he's a really nice guy..."), but it just feels pretentious, as a language. The Paulson text really doesn't help.

And it's not that it's totally debilitating, trying to code in it, anymore... it's just that it's incredibly slow going, and the documentation sucks. And this is me whining that I could whip out the cs4240 project in LISP in like a quarter of the time, if that.

Nyip, off to go do things...

Comments

[sstrickl.livejournal.com]

And now I reread the quote and see "Normal people find pattern-matching more readable than hd and tl." Oops, I wouldn't have even posted what I did if I'd seen that, though I am still curious as to why you prefer the other :)

I swear I'm not an idiot!