haskell so i needed to exercise my tired old brain cells and make them young again by learning something new. i stumbled across this functional programming language called haskell. the last time i used a functional language was prologue and lisp. and that was way back. back before wysiwyg. so anywho. i read a bit about it. and it seemed to have some interesting features. like stronger type checking than normal. writing working functional code is a bit of a mind fuck. at least for those of us who are accustomed to giving computers explicit marching orders and expecting them to be followed. to the letter. heh, computer - go jump off the end of memory. wee! haskell isn't completely pure. i don't think any useful functional language can be. in that i mean within haskell there's the ability to write ordinary imperative code. they call it pollution. yeah whatever. a program that solves the mysteries of the universe is pretty useless if it can't actually output the answer. sheehs. haskell isn't perfect. at times it isn't even nice. the syntax is nearly unreadably compact. but not as bad as apl. the standard library is huge. and some of the functions aren't named well. but not as badly as lisp. i'm sure the perfect function is in one of the standard libraries. but that knowledge is useless if i can't find it. i did manage to get a sudoku solver working. it ain't pretty. but then, i don't think anything in haskell ever will be. i never did figure out how to debug a "program". not even with printfs. sheehs. so anywho, the haskell functions would be wonderful things to be able to call from within a real programming language.  ¶ 8:00 AM