Frances Allen: C has destroyed our ability to advance the state of the art in automatic optimization, automatic parallelization, automatic mapping of a high-level language to the machine. Example from HN user ‘waps’: one example [vs Haskell] that C can never hope to optimize : deforestation. Before optimization : the programmer requests a list to be created, fill it by calling functions and then passes the completed datastructure list (or tree) along to another function, which executes co...
