[Haskell-cafe] Re: Why purely in haskell?

[Don Stewart]

rendel:
> jerzy.karczmarczuk at info.unicaen.fr wrote:
> >>Although it could be argued that laziness is the cause of some very 
> >>obscure bugs... <g> Niko
> >
> >Example, PLEASE.
> 
> Prelude> sum [1..1000000]
> *** Exception: stack overflow
> 
> Prelude> Data.List.foldl' (+) 0 [1..1000000]
> 500000500000

See,
  http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/1997

Strictness for for atomic numeric types is inconsitently applied 
across the base library. Fixing the inconsitencies would let 
fix a range of similar issues.

Note the strictness analyser handles this in compiled code, but doesn't
run in ghci.

-- Don