haskell reify, was sequencing data structures

[Alastair Reid]

> Things that seem important (to me) are:
>
>    - Do you want to observe cycles and or sharing?

Yes.

>      Of course this is very hard to do because of garbage collection.

Only in the sense that holding onto an object pointer to detect a cycle might 
cause you to hold onto the object too - causing a space leak.  Weak pointers 
probably play a useful role in solving this but I didn't explore this.

>      In buddha I observe cycles
>      but not other forms of sharing. To do this I have to be very careful
>      not to cause garbage collection when I'm traversing the heap.
>      I don't remember now whether you can observe cycles using the
>      Hugs internals interface. I _think_ that it was possible but I don't
>      remember.

Yes, Hugs lets you see sharing..  The CVHAssert module makes use of cycle and 
sharing detection in calculating the heap space consumed by an object.

The Hugs interface has:

- raw objects of type 'alpha'  (i.e., the Haskell type of the object)

- object pointers of type 'Cell' (would be better called 'Thunk'?) which 
provide a layer of indirection to the object.  This indirection lets you prod 
a thunk pointer ni various ways without evaluating the object it points to.
These pointers support pointer equality tests with short-circuiting of 
indirection nodes.

- Cell classifications - whether it is an Int, Float, application, thunk, etc.



>    - Do you want the ability to force thunks or just stop when you see
> them? The incremental approach of the Hugs interface is nice, but I'm
> worried that it will make the detection of cycles harder - that's the
> reason I moved to reify in buddha away from Hugs style. (In buddha I just
> want to print things up to the extent that they are evaluated when reify is
> called, I stop when I see a thunk, cycle, nullary constructor).

Detecting cycles is easy in the Hugs interface.
You can continue observing below an unevaluated thunk if you wish - just print 
the name of the supercombinator and keep going (or disassemble the 
supercombinator if you wish).  Or you can force an unevaluated thunk if that 
takes your fancy.

--
Alastair