[Haskell-cafe] Can't Haskell catch upwith Clean's uniqueness typing?

[haskell-cafe.mail.zooloo at xoxy.net]

From: "Shae Matijs Erisson - shae at ScannedInAvian.com"
Sent: Tuesday, December 06, 2005 6:16 PM


> haskell-cafe.mail.zooloo at xoxy.net writes:
>
> > being occupied with learning both languages, I'm getting curious if
> > Haskell couldn't achieve most of the performance gains resulting from
> > uniqueness typing in Clean by *automatically* determining the reference
> > count of arguments wherever possible and subsequently allowing them to
> > be physically replaced immediately by (the corresponding part of) the
> > function's result. Are there any principal obstacles, or *could* this be
> > done, or *is* this even done already, e. g. in ghc?
>
> Maybe you're describing speculative evaluation?
>
> Optimistic Evaluation: An Adaptive Evaluation Strategy for Non-Strict Programs
> http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/ennals03optimistic.html
> --


Thanks for the pointer - I have heard a little about optimistic evaluation already, but don't know much of the
details (yet). Anyway, from what I know, I think it's a different thing.

In Clean, you can (and often are required to) assign uniqueness attributes to some parts of a function's type signature.
The extended type checker ensures that none of those parts is referred to more than once during a single run of the
program. Based on this guarantee, a function does not have to allocate new memory at all to store a unique result but can
overwrite the unique arguments in place.

Apparently, the uniqueness assignments have to comply with very tight laws - getting a program through the Clean type
checker can be tough, once it reports an uniqueness coercion error. I suppose, no explicit uniqueness attributing is going
to be implemented in Haskell, anyway.

My question is - and this might better suit to Haskell -, can't uniqueness be inferred (and exploited) automatically in
many cases?


Regards,

zooloo




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