Questions about sharing

[Adrian Hey]

On Friday 07 December 2001  3:09 pm, Simon Marlow wrote:
> > The second is..
> > If, following pattern matching, the matched pattern appears in an
> > expression, is it shared or duplicated..
> > e.g. (a:as) -> f (a:as)
> > Maybe I should write something like this..
> >      x@(a:as) -> f x
> > (I know that sometimes the type checker won't allow you to do this)
>
> Yes, GHC will common these up (with -O).  I'm not sure I understand the
> point about the type checker not letting you do this yourself, though:
> surely x and (a:as) have the same type?

In this particular case they do, but sometimes this isn't so. 
IE in.. case <expression1>
	x@<pattern> -> <expression2> 
the x has the same type as <expression1>, which isn't
necessarily the same as would be inferred using..
	x=<pattern>
(here the pattern is really an expression of course)

A long long time ago I griped about this in a thread the main
haskell.org mailing list (called "Pattern match success changes
types" IIRC).

IMHO variables bound using 'as patterns' like..
	x@<pattern> -> <expression>
should be re-typed as if they had been written..
	<pattern> -> let x=<pattern> in <expression>  
in order to make sharing possible.

I don't think anybody agrees with me though :-)

Regards
-- 
Adrian Hey