[Haskell-cafe] Why does this blow the stack?

[Derek Elkins]

On Fri, 2007-12-21 at 09:13 -0800, Justin Bailey wrote:
> Given this function:
> 
>   dropTest n = head . drop n $ [1..]
> 
> I get a stack overflow when n is greater than ~ 550,000 . Is that
> inevitable behavior for large n? Is there a better way to do it?

A similar example is discussed on
http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Stack_overflow at the bottom.