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Today's Status of Functional Programming Languages for Verification Tools ?
An interesting conclusion based on the ML and Haskell implementations existing in October, 2002 comes from the paper
"Functional Programming Languages for Verification Tools: A Comparison of ML and Haskell", by Perdita Stevens with Martin Leucker, Thomas Noll, Michael Weber
[quote] 6 Conclusion There have been positive and negative aspects to both our sets of experiences with Haskell and ML, as there would doubtless have been with whatever language we had chosen. Overall, we consider Standard ML to be a slightly better choice for our kind of application than Haskell, more because of a more stable environment of supporting tools than because of language features. Of course, there are many alternatives including other functional languages of which we have less experience; O'Caml might be a strong candidate. However, it turned out in our discussions that none of us were enthusiastic about the idea of using a functional language for a fu- ture verification tool, because of their impoverished envi- ronments compared with mainstream programming lan- guages. Our conclusion is that if/when we develop new verification tools, these will be written in \a Java-ready subset of C++". That is, we would prefer to be writ- ing in Java, but at present this appears premature for performance reasons. We would write therefore in C++, trying to avoid using features (such as multiple inheri- tance, non-virtual functions, \friends") which cannot be readily translated into Java. [/quote]What would be a conclusion of such a comparison today? Also interesting and very true observation from the same article: [quote] Why is there so little material to help developers make an informed choice? Part of the reason must be that it is very hard to do convincing comparisons of lan- guages without being vulnerable to the criticism that one is not comparing like with like. We think that a fair comparison needs to be based on real experience of peo- ple using the languages to build real systems in the same domain; otherwise it is almost impossible to be sure that diferences are not due to diferences in the domains of application. The systems themselves need to be broadly comparable in size and complexity, need to be more than toys, and should preferably have been developed and maintained over years (since a language that makes de- velopment easy might nevertheless encourage the devel- opment of code which is unmaintainable). Moreover, the domain should be one where either of the languages is a reasonable choice, and the comparison should be done by people with a reasonably typical level of experience in the languages. A comparison is probably most generally useful to developers when it is done neither by novices in the languages compared nor by people intimately fa- miliar with the compiler internals. [/quote]more from the same author... By Dmitri Kondratiev at 2005-05-31 08:09 | LtU Forum | previous forum topic | next forum topic | other blogs | 6944 reads
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