[Haskell-cafe] Compiler's bane

[Lennart Augustsson]

You can get rid of all recursive bindings by transforming them into a
use of a fixpoint combinator.
And then you can use a non-recursive definition of the fixpoint
combinator, and never worry about recursive bindings again.

  -- Lennart

On Wed, Aug 27, 2008 at 8:59 PM, Andrew Coppin
<andrewcoppin at btinternet.com> wrote:
> Hi guys.
>
> I'm writing a simple interpretter for a small extended-lambda-calculus sort
> of language. And I'd just like to say... RECURSIVE LET-BINDS! GAAAAH!!! >_<
>
> No other part of the program has consumed nearly as much brain power as me
> trying to figure out when it is and isn't safe to replace a variable with
> its RHS.
>
> To illustrate:
>
>  let x = f x; y = 5 in x y
>
> A simple-minded interpretter might try to replace every occurrance of "x"
> with "f x". This yields
>
>  let y = 5 in (f x) y
>
> ...and x is now a free variable. OOPS!
>
> Trying to tease out exactly under which conditions you can and cannot
> perform the substitution is utterly maddening. Since this is a Haskell
> mailing list and as such it is populated by vast numbers of people with PhDs
> and so forth... does anybody happen to know the *correct* solution to this
> conundrum? Before I become clinically insane...? o_O
>
>
>
> By the way... To all those people who work on projects like GHC and so on,
> who have to get this stuff right "for real": you have my infinite respect!
>
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