How do I force evaluation?

[Michael Weber]

On Tue, Mar 13, 2001 at 09:40:09 +0200, Matthias Fischmann wrote:
> Yes, that does not look very nice but it should work.  In a private
> response, I was also pointed out the alternative solution of using
> case together with `seq` to trigger evaluation, which looked like the
> default way to me (what else is seq for?):

suppose sth. like:

	foo someRecord = do
	    ...
	    foo someRecord{ field = field' }

this may lead to quite some memory allocation (I had this case once,
IIRC), and eventually it can be reduced by using `seq`:

	foo someRecord = do
	    ...
	    let r = someRecord{ field = field' } 
            r `seq` foo r	    


> 
> |         case monstrousDS `seq` True of True -> hPutStr stderr "ok."

*hmm* this just evaluates to WHNF, no?
From hugs:

	Prelude> case (42,error "foo") `seq` True of True -> putStrLn "yow"
	yow

> I first tried to wrap this in a `force' function, thereby proving that
> I still haven't grasped the concept entirely.  (-:

	forceEval x = if x == x then x else x

but this *still* needs a decent equality on `x'... 8->

> But maybe it is possible to make a primitive of this in the same way
> as has been done with assert?

This would definitely help to e.g. keep exceptions inside
`catch'-blocks sometimes (of course at the expense of not being able
to use infinite data structures at the same time there)...


Cheers,
Michael
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