From: beshers@edu.columbia.cs.tune (Clifford Beshers)

From: beshers@edu.columbia.cs.tune (Clifford Beshers)
Subject: A Good Story
Date: Thu, 1 Apr 93 11:05:13 EST
To: haskell@EDU.YALE.CS

David Wakeling writes:

   Yes, Certainly. Here at York we have a small electrical hoist in one of the
   Departmental stairwells which is used for lifting expensive and delicate
   equipment onto the upper floor of the building. As part of an experiment in
   real time functional programming, I wrote a Haskell program to control this
   hoist. It proved to be a tricky exercise: the hoist is controlled by a number
   of registers, and reading and writing these registers in the correct order
   with the correct values proved to be a royal pain. Indeed, the experiment had
   to be stopped after the accidental destruction of a 386-box, 16 wine glasses
   and a large rubber plant during a UFC visit.

   Efficient, convenient and reliable IO is one important area that we intend to
   address with Haskerl.

   Watch this space for further details.

   David Wakeling (Chair, Haskerl WG)

Paul Hudak writes:

   Date:         Thu, 1 Apr 1993 10:26:31 -0500
   Reply-To: haskell@cs.yale.edu
   Sender: Haskell Distribution List <HASKLD-L@YaleVM.YCC.Yale.Edu>
   From: hudak@CS.YALE.EDU

   For every bad story there is a good one.  Recently Haskell was used
   in an experiment here at Yale in the Medical School.  It was used to
   replace a C program that controlled a heart-lung machine.  In the six
   months that it was in operation, the hospital estimates that probably
   a dozen lives were saved because the program was far more robust than
   the C program, which often crashed and killed the patients.

   -Paul

Fascinating stories.  Would you please repost these on April 2?
I'd love to believe they were true...