Comment by codygman

12 years ago

> Idris - it seems like the only one that's oriented towards practical programming

Whether you like ATS or not, it's very oriented towards practical programming. Also, ATS mostly looks bad IMO because of the style the author uses.

I still haven't fully formed an opinion on ATS though. Idris does seem really cool and stuff like enforcing time/space usage through the type system excites me.

3 comments

codygman

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mcguire  12 years ago

I'm not sure whether my issue with ATS is the style of the author or its type system, although I suspect the former.

ATS is based on ML (the author started with Dependent ML), but the code has a very imperative feel, leading to statements like "let () = expr() in ..." and "let x = ... in ()".

The stuff at http://www.ats-lang.org/Examples.html is just hideous, by the way.

  • codygman  12 years ago

    Here's just a small translation of the ats examples[0] page.

    ----------------- Copying File ----------------

    Authors version:

        fun
    fcopy (
      inp: FILEref
    , out: FILEref
    ) : void = let
      val c = fileref_getc (inp)
    in
      if c >= 0 then let
        val () = fileref_putc (out, c) in fcopy (inp, out)
      end // end of [if]
    end (* end of [fcopy] *)

    ----------------- Naieve Fibonacci ----------------

    My version:

        fun fcopy ( 
      inp: FILEref,
      out: FILEref
    ) : void = let
      val c = fileref_getc (inp)
    in
      if c >= 0 then let
        val () = fileref_putc (out, c) in fcopy (inp, out)
      end 
    end

    Authors version:

        fun
    fib (
      n: int
    ) : int =
      if n >= 2 then fib (n-2) + fib (n-1) else n

    My Version (not sure if valid!):

        fun fib ( n: int ) : 
      int = if n >= 2 then fib (n-2) + fib (n-1) else n

    ----------------- Fast Fibonacci ----------------

    Authors Version:

        fun
    fibc (
      n: int
    ) : int = let
      fun loop (n: int, f0: int, f1: int) =
        if n > 0 then loop (n-1, f1, f0+f1) else f0
      // end of [loop]
    in
      loop (n, 0, 1)
    end // end of [fibc]

    My Version:

        fun fibc ( n: int ) : int = 
      let
        fun loop (n: int, f0: int, f1: int) =
          if n > 0 then loop (n-1, f1, f0+f1) else f0
      in
      loop (n, 0, 1)
    end

    0: http://www.ats-lang.org/Examples.html