I ran across something earlier today wherein someone held forth on the subject of the syntactic supremacy of Haskell over just about all other languages, in a piece titled on syntax. The thesis of this thing was, in essence, that the "language of the future" should have a syntax like Haskell's, because Haskell's syntax is best.

I'm skeptical, of course. As a means of demonstrating how great Haskell's syntax is, however, he decided to use a simple fibonacci number calculation subroutine, implemented in a number of different languages. His Perl example looked like this:

    sub fibo
    {
        my ($n, $a, $b) = (shift, 0, 1);
        ($a, $b) = ($b, $a + $b) while $n-- > 0;
        $a;
    }
[download]

I find that to be unnecessarily ugly. I edited it a little bit for my own purposes, adding code to actually use the subroutine and reformatting it to eliminate a little aesthetic discomfort thusly:

use strict;
use warnings;
use Memoize;

memoize('fib');

foreach my $x (0..$ARGV[0]) {
  print fib($x);
}

sub fib {
  my ($n, $a, $b) = (shift, 0, 1);
  ($a, $b) = ($b, $a + $b) while $n-- > 0;
  $a;
}
[download]

Even so, I don't really think it's ideal. I wrote another version of it from scratch, in a manner I thought would be much prettier:

use strict;
use warnings;
use Memoize;

memoize('fib');

foreach my $x (0..$ARGV[0]) {
  print fib($x);
}

sub fib {
  my $n = shift;
  return $n if $n < 2;
  return fib($n - 1) + fib($n - 2);
}
[download]

So, I do have a question:

Is there any particular reason the Haskell guy's version is better than my recursive version?

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