"interact" behaves oddly if used interactively

[Olaf Chitil]

Simon Marlow wrote:
> Certainly you can observe non-strictness, that's not the point.  The point is that you can also observe more than just non-strictness using interact, and I don't think that is desirable.  For example:
> 
>   interact (\xs -> let z = length xs in "Hello World\n")
> 
> Now, Haskell is a pure language, so it shouldn't matter whether the implementation evaluates z or not, as long as it is careful not to violate the non-strict semantics by turning a terminating program into a non-terminating one.  A parallel Haskell implementation might happily spawn off another thread to evaluate z for example.  An optimistic implementation might evaluate z for a fixed amount of time before continuing with the main thread of evaluation.
> 
> BUT in the presence of lazy I/O this simply isn't true any more.  Why?  Because z is not pure; evaluating it has a side-effect.  And yet it has type Int.  Am I the only one who thinks this is wrong?

I don't know what everyone else thinks, but I do not see your problem.
There is nothing impure about z. According to non-strict semantics we
have

(\xs -> let z = length xs in "Hello World\n") _|_ = "Hello World\n"

So every implementation has to make sure that this equation holds.

You know it is not enough for optimistic evaluation to `avoid _|_' by
evaluating eagerly only for a fixed amount of time. You also have to
bail out if evaluation raises an exception. This in particular if eager
evaluation causes a black hole: reevaluation at some later time may
yield a perfectly fine value. Likewise the presence of lazy IO forces
you to test if the value is currently available or needs to be read from
some handle; the presence of lazy IO adds another sort of black hole.

Yes, the presence of lazy IO makes optimistic evaluation more
complicated, but I do not see that it compromises the purity of the
language in anyway (whatever purity is ;-).

Olaf

-- 
OLAF CHITIL, 
 Dept. of Computer Science, The University of York, York YO10 5DD, UK. 
 URL: http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/~olaf/
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