[Haskell-cafe] Cyclic Inclusions

[Thomas Davie]

On 12 Aug 2008, at 11:59, C.M.Brown wrote:

> Andrew,
>
> Thanks very much for your reponse. It was very helpful; this makes a  
> lot
> of sense!
>
>> And yes, some people think that this is a bug in the specification.
>>

I'm not sure that it does make a lot of sense -- we allow (mutually)  
recursive functions, even though they come with an efficiency  
penalty.  Why should we not allow (mutually) recursive modules, even  
though they too come with an efficiency penalty.  This is even an  
example where the efficiency loss is *only* at compile time, and only  
happens once, so it's somewhat a better situation than allowing  
mutually recursive functions.

I'd say it falls very heavily into the ghc-bug category, not the spec  
bug category (even if there's reasons for the bug existing in ghc).

Bob