Re: [boost] Books for MetaProgrammers: ML, Haskell, Scheme

From: Jeremy Siek (jsiek_at_[hidden])
Date: 2001-11-28 17:20:30

On Wed, 28 Nov 2001, Mat Marcus wrote:

mmarcu> * Is it better to spend time studying Haskell, ML, or Scheme? Which
mmarcu> is closer in spirit to template metaprogramming? That is, which book
mmarcu> will pay higher dividends for compile time C++ idioms: Haskell: The
mmarcu> Craft of Functional Programming, ML for the Working Programmer, or
mmarcu> Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programming? Perhaps
mmarcu> Peyton-Jones's book or another would be most useful.

I've read the ML Working Programmer, An Intro to Function Programming
using Haskell, Peyton-Jone's book, and Structure and Interp of Comp. Prog.
(SICP). My personal favorite is the SICP book. In general I like Scheme
for functional programming, but Scheme doesn't have the builtin pattern
matching of ML or Haskell (and pattern matching is directly analogous to
using partial specialization). Scheme does have very cool syntax pattern
matching (the macro system) that works in an analogous fashion, but for a
different purpose. I learned a lot from studying ML, I've spent less time
with Haskell.

Cheers,
Jeremy

----------------------------------------------------------------------
 Jeremy Siek                          http://php.indiana.edu/~jsiek/
 Ph.D. Student, Indiana Univ. B'ton   email: jsiek_at_[hidden]
 C++ Booster (http://www.boost.org)   office phone: [phone]
----------------------------------------------------------------------