How to detect finite/infinite lists?

[Juanma Barranquero]

Extremely-newbie questions:

Is there any way to know if a list is finite or infinite, other than
doing:

  length l

and waiting forever? :)

I ask because I was learning Haskell by writing some pretty naive
implementation of surreal numbers, where I used lists for left and right
surreal sets, and I wanted to do some operations on the sets (like
finding the maximum/minimum), but obviously just on finite sets.

I vaguely suspect the answer is going to be: "No, because lists are lazy
(at least when they are :) and there's no general way to know beforehand
how many elements they're going to have". But still, if I write

 x = [1..5]

the compiler knows pretty well x is not going to grow any new member...

(Unrelated) Is there any standard function to do:

 interleave []     _      = []
 interleave _      []     = []
 interleave (x:xs) (y:ys) = x : y : interleave xs ys

It's pretty easy to implement as shown or via zipWith, but given that
Haskell 98 already includes some "basic" functions (like cycle, iterate,
etc.) I wonder if I've missed this one somehow.

Thanks,

                                                           /L/e/k/t/u