[Haskell-cafe] Re: Getting my feet wet - not in Haskell though

[rossberg at ps.uni-sb.de]

Joachim Durchholz wrote:
>
>> To adhere to uniformity, strong abstraction, and the Principle of
>> Least Surprise, we thus chose to force lazy futures in Alice ML.
>
> Well, I wouldn't have expected that pickling has an effect (other than
> wrapping the value up for transfer), so at least I would have been
> greatly surprised.

That "effect" is just strictness. Since you generally cannot pickle a
future (and usually wouldn't want to), pickling naturally has to be
strict. Making lazy futures a special case, in this one single strict
operation, would be surprising (and extremely ad-hoc).

- Andreas