skip links for text browsers skip to main | skip to sidebar The Flying Frog Blog Sunday, 1 August 2010 Haskell has a history of making easy problems difficult. Perhaps the most infamous example was the Sieve of Eratosthenes, which is easily implemented in any imperative language but was so difficult to write in Haskell that almost all of the solutions that had been taught in universities and used in research for the preceding 18 years had been wrong until Melissa O'Neill published a seminal paper The Genuine Sieve of Eratosthenes that gave a beautiful description of what they had been doing wrong and how it should be corrected. Melissa's solution was to use a priority queue to implement a rolling wheel of numbers. The correct solution turned out to be 10× longer than a much simpler F# solution and a whopping 100× longer than the original bas...