seq vs. pseq

[Simon Marlow]

Ross Paterson wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 06, 2006 at 06:25:48PM +0000, Malcolm Wallace wrote:
> 
>>When I use `seq`, it is sometimes in a construction like
>>
>>    unsafePerformIO (emit "squawk!) `seq` x
>>
>>where I am trying to force the impure side-effect to happen, exactly and
>>immediately before x is evaluated.  Whilst this is not good style in a
>>general sense, I argue that it is perfectly safe inside certain kinds of
>>library (e.g. for calculating coverage information, or for emitting
>>tracing information).  But if the language itself cannot guarantee this
>>exact placement of side-effects, then it becomes impossible to write
>>computation-reflective tools like Hat and hpc for Haskell, in Haskell.
>>That would surely be a sad state of affairs.
> 
> 
> Without admitting the existence of "unsafePerformIO", I submit
> 
> 	unsafePerformIO (emit "squawk! >> return x)
> 
> where >> really does imply sequencing.

Does it?  What's stopping a Haskell implementation from evaluating x early?  As 
far as I know, the only time it wouldn't be valid is if x refers to a stream 
created by hGetContents, and even then you could evaluate it early as long as 
you don't move it past some I/O operation that could "tell the difference" 
(although the report doesn't really say this explicitly, it's just the accepted 
behaviour of lazy input streams).

Cheers,
	Simon