[clean-list] Clean's answer to the Functional Achilles-heel

[Mark Phillips]

Fergus Henderson wrote:
> 
> It's true that no single approach has emerged to be _the_ answer,
> but calling it "the Achilles-heel" is way too strong.
> All of the different approaches are certainly adequate.

Probably you are right in saying that "Achilles-heel" is too strong.  
I wonder however whether the Functional/Logic approach is only half 
the answer to a good programming paradigm.  Haskell's approach to IO, 
if I understand things correctly, is to embed its functional language 
inside a specialized form of imperative engine.  Does the Clean approach
do something similar?

One of functional programming's big "claims to fame" is the
ease with which one may analyse it, ie prove things about programs.  
I wonder however whether this ease comes at a cost.  Perhaps
imperative languages are more complicated to analyse, but
allow some forms of (desirable) complexity that functional
languages do not.  I've been reading a paper,

  http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/krishnamurthi98synthesizing.html

where the authors suggest a means of combining object-oriented
and functional approachs, the result of which is a paradigm
that allows for maxiumum code reuse.  The thing which struck
me about this paper was that their implementation required
the power of an object-oriented language --- functional languages
do not seem to have sufficient power to express their model.

Perhaps functional/logic languages need to move further in the
imperative direction???  (I speak as a novice, so I could well
be wrong --- I am trying to get a feel for the landscape of
programming paradigms.)

Cheers,

Mark.