[Shootout-list] Safety vs. speed

[Brian Hurt]

On Tue, 21 Sep 2004, Peter Hinely wrote:

> I think it would be good to have a column on the shootout indicating
> whether the entry is "safe" or not.

Define "safe".  Welcome to a flame war, and you're welcome to it.  I mean, 
the static vr.s dynamic type checking religous war is joining the Linux v. 
Windows and the legendary Emacs v. Vi religous wars.  And that's just one 
aspect of "safety".

Personally, I think it's beyond Shootout's mandate.  We're not measuring a 
language's "goodness", just it's "performance".  The performance- how long 
does the language take to solve certain problems, how much memory, how 
many lines of code- we can put more or less hard numbers on.  And we can 
apply the same rules to all languages, and be fair for some loose enough 
definition of fair.

> Are the Haskell, ML entries, etc. entries safe?  I had assumed so, but now
> I'm not so sure.  I don't know enough about those languages to know.
> Looking on the web, I see that most of those languages at least have the
> option of turning off bounds checking, or using primitive modules that
> lack bounds checking.

Ocaml has:
- strong, static type checking
- array and string bounds checking by default, but turned off in the tests 
IIRC (-unsafe option)
- silently overflowing integers

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Brian