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

[David Benbennick]

Since it's possible to support laziness for Integer (while still
avoiding any stack overflow), I think it makes sense to do so.  What
if you have some big complicated program like the following:

x = some big slow computation
y = [x..]

lots of code

z = length $ take 10 y


Why bother computing x if you don't have to?  And as an added benefit,
if you keep laziness, you don't have to worry about possibly breaking
any programs that depend on the current lazy behavior.

Laziness would NOT make sense for Int, since Int is bounded.  You
can't tell how long [(x::Int) ..] is without evaluating x.

On 12/22/07, Don Stewart <dons at galois.com> wrote:
> People shouldn't be writing code that depends on this!

One of the main features of Haskell is that it's lazy.  I don't think
it's wrong to write code that depends on laziness.