Abstract

Functional programming is largely untested in the industrial environment. This paper summarises the results of a study into the suitability of Haskell in the area of text compression, an area with definite commercial interest. Our program initially performs very poorly in comparison with a version written in C. Experiments reveal the cause of this to be the large disparity in the relative speed of I/O and bit--level operations and also a space leak inherent in the Haskell definition. 1 Introduction Claims for the advantages of functional programming languages abound [1] but industrial take--up of the paradigm has been almost non--existent. Two of the main reasons for this are: ffl lack of proof that the advantages apply to large--scale developments; ffl lack of industry--strength compilers and environments, particularly for high speed computation. The FLARE project, managed by BT, sets out to address these issues: "The effectiveness of functional programming has been amply ...