[Haskell-cafe] Serialization of (a -> b) and IO a

[Sjoerd Visscher]

On Nov 11, 2010, at 3:36 PM, Dan Doel wrote:

> On Thursday 11 November 2010 6:22:06 am Sjoerd Visscher wrote:
> 
>> The reasoning above is used regularly to shoot down some really useful
>> functionality. So what would go wrong if we chose to take the practical
>> path, and leave aside the theoretical issues?
> 
> You would lose many uses of equational reasoning in your programs. Have you 
> every substituted 'x * 2' for the expression 'x + x' in one of your programs, 
> or vice versa? You can no longer do that, because someone may be serializing 
> the function you're writing, checking how it's implemented, and relying it.


Yes, but it would not break any existing code. It would only break code that knowingly did the wrong thing.

> We already have a weak case of this, since (\x -> undefined x) can be 
> distinguished from undefined using seq, but that can be hand-waved away by not 
> worrying about bottoms so much. That isn't going to work for serialize.

Why not?

--
Sjoerd Visscher
http://w3future.com