[Haskell-cafe] Re: Shouldn't this loop indefinitely => take (last [0..]) [0..]

[Bryan O'Sullivan]

Don Stewart wrote:

>> Which, incidentally, also explains why Don couldn't reproduce it on a 64-
>> bit system.  There, instead of hanging for about a minute before printing 
>> out the list, it would hang for about 4 billion minutes.

A billion minutes here, a billion minutes there, and pretty soon you're
talking about enough time to brew a nice cup of tea.

> It's also interesting how our 32 bit machines are fast enough now
> to make Int indices noticeably problematic. And thankfully, 64 bit
> machines are common enough now that the 32 bit Int issues are less of
> an issue.

Alas, we've swapped that for a big performance slowdown due to the
doubled size of pointers, courtesy of STG's addiction thereto.

	<b