[Haskell-cafe] A probably-stupid question about a Prelude implementation.

[Neil Mitchell]

Hi Michael,

You're wrong :)

> foldr (||) False (repeat True)

Gives:

> True

Remember that in Haskell everything is lazy, which means that the ||
short-circuits as soon as it can.

Thanks

Neil


On 6/22/07, Michael T. Richter <ttmrichter at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>  So, I'm now going over the code in the 'Report with a fine-toothed comb
> because a) I'm actually able to read it now pretty fluently and b) I want to
> know what's there in detail for a project I'm starting.  I stumbled across
> this code:
>
>  any :: (a -> Bool) -> [a] -> Bool
> any p = or . map p
>
> or :: [Bool] -> Bool
> or = foldr (||) False
>
>
> Now I see how this works and it's all elegant and clear and all that.  But
> I have two nagging problems with it (that are likely related):
>
>    1. Using foldr means I'll be traversing the whole list no matter
>    what.  This implies (perhaps for a good reason) that it can only work on a
>    finite list.
>    2. I don't see any early bale-out semantics.  The way I read this
>    it's going to expand a whole list of n and perform n comparisons (including
>    the one with the provided False).
>
>
> Considering that I only need a single True result to make the whole
> expression true, I'd have expected there to be some clever semantics to
> allow exactly this.  But what I'm seeing, unless I'm really misreading the
> code, is that if I give it a list of a million boolean expressions, it will
> cheerfully evaluate these million boolean expressions and perform a million
> calls to (||) before giving me a result.
>
> Please tell me I'm wrong and that I'm missing something?
>
>   --
> *Michael T. Richter* <ttmrichter at gmail.com> (*GoogleTalk:*
> ttmrichter at gmail.com)
> *There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make
> it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other way is
> to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. (Charles
> Hoare)*
>
> _______________________________________________
> Haskell-Cafe mailing list
> Haskell-Cafe at haskell.org
> http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
>
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/attachments/20070622/d20b7c77/attachment.htm