[Haskell-cafe] Strange type behavior in GHCi 6.4.2

Kirsten Chevalier catamorphism at gmail.com
Sun Dec 31 11:47:18 EST 2006


On 12/31/06, Bulat Ziganshin <bulat.ziganshin at gmail.com> wrote:
> this don't say anything place. and these rules have their own source: it's
> hard to optimize using your path. but when program optimization is just
> adding a few options/pragmas to the program, it' becomes cheap enough to
> change these rules. didn't you thought about it?
>

In my experience, adding pragmas and toying with options without
insight into what they do is not "cheap", because it takes up the
programmer's time, and time is more important than anything else.
Every minute spent typing in pragmas is a minute lost that could have
been spent thinking about how to write your code more elegantly, and
in my experience -- and again, maybe it's just that I'm slow -- adding
pragmas doesn't help. When it comes to inlining and specializing, GHC
tends to be smarter than I am. (Once more, maybe it's just that I'm
slow.) I'd rather focus my energies on doing the things GHC can't
(usually) do, like replacing an O(n^2) algorithm with an O(log n)
algorithm.

Cheers,
Kirsten

-- 
Kirsten Chevalier* chevalier at alum.wellesley.edu *Often in error, never in doubt
"Happy is all in your head / When you wake up and you're not dead / It's a
sign of maturation / That you've lowered your expectations..."--Barbara Kessler


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