[Haskell-cafe] function unique

[Dan Weston]

Tim Chevalier wrote:
> On 7/12/07, Jonathan Cast <jcast at ou.edu> wrote:
>> No.  Of course not.  Before making wild guesses about how GHC is 
>> implementing
>> your code, read (and understand[1]) the STG paper:
>>
>> http://research.microsoft.com/copyright/accept.asp?path=/users/simonpj/papers/spineless-tagless-gmachine.ps.gz&pub=34 
>>
>>
> 
> In this particular case, reading the simplifier paper would probably
> be more relevant:
> http://research.microsoft.com/copyright/accept.asp?path=/users/simonpj/papers/comp-by-trans.ps.gz&pub=18 
> 
> Or even just understanding the syntax of Core, really.
> 
>> [1] Understanding the STG paper is not a requirement to using Haskell, 
>> just to
>> making wild (incorrect) guesses about how the compiler's going to 
>> treat your
>> code.  But, of course, making wild (incorrect) guesses about how the
>> compiler's going to treat your code is not a requirement to using 
>> Haskell.
> 
> Amen!
> 
> Cheers,
> Tim
> 

I realize now that it was inappropriate to pose a question to this list 
before I knew the answer! :(

Anyway, it turned out that the two ghc -ddump-simpl outputs were in fact 
identical, but only after identifier renaming. It would be very useful 
to have a tool that takes two core files and attempts to rename 
identifiers from the second to match the first. Is there already such a 
smart-diff tool out there?

Dan