"interact" behaves oddly if used interactively

[Nicholas Nethercote]

On Wed, 1 Oct 2003, Robert Ennals wrote:

> Haskell is a good language, pureness is good, type classes are good,
> monads are good - but laziness is holding it back.

Hear hear.

I have often wondered how much simpler the various Haskell implementations
would be if they used strict evaluation.  It seems like laziness
complicates implementations tremendously;  the STG-machine paper makes my
head spin.

If laziness is really getting you down, you could try Mercury -- it is
pure, strict and has type classes, although it has no built-in monad
handling.  I seem to remember seeing something about it having some
support for explicitly-marked laziness, but I might be wrong about that.

N