Funser: a Functional Server for Textual Information Retrieval

The paper describes a data-intensive application written in a lazy functional language: a server for textual information retrieval. The design illustrates the importance of interoperability, the capability of interacting with code written in other programming languages. Lazy functional programming is shown to be a powerful and elegant means of accomplishing several desirable concrete goals: delivering initial results promptly, using space economically, and avoiding unnecessary I/O. Performance results, however, are mixed. 1 Introduction Is it possible to write a "real" application in a pure functional language? This question has been asked many times, at conferences, on Internet newsgroups, and in papers, and perhaps the answer is beginning to be yes. This paper describes work that attempts to answer this question in the context of full-text information retrieval; for this kind of "real" application, we have found the answer to be, for now, maybe. The researchers at the Center for Inf..