[Haskell-cafe] Re: Suspected stupid Haskell Question

[Albert Y. C. Lai]

Thomas Hartman wrote:
> Since I'm interested in the stack overflow issue, and getting acquainted 
> with quickcheck, I thought I would take this opportunity to compare your 
> ordTable with some code Yitzchak Gale posted earlier, against Ham's 
> original problem.
> 
> As far as I can tell, they're the same. They work on lists up to 100000 
> element lists of strings, but on 10^6 size lists I lose patience waiting 
> for them to finish.
> 
> Is there a more scientific way of figuring out if one version is better 
> than the other by using, say profiling tools?
> 
> Or by reasoning about the code?

It can be reasoned. Some people know how to do it. No one has written up 
the method and theory properly. It is currently rather ad hoc. I want to 
write one in the future.

Some of the knowledge is in:

http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Stack_overflow

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Haskell (Advanced Track, Haskell Performance)

Richard Bird's "Introduction to Functional Programming using Haskell", 
second edition (chapter 7 "Efficiency", but also other chapters contain 
efficiency discussions)

anything that adequately defines lazy evaluation (or whatever evaluation 
your favourite executor seems to use)