[Haskell-cafe] Problems with strictness analysis?

[Henning Thielemann]

On Mon, 3 Nov 2008, Luke Palmer wrote:

> On Mon, Nov 3, 2008 at 2:54 PM, Don Stewart <dons at galois.com> wrote:
>>
>> "Optimisations" enable strictness analysis.
>
> I was actually being an annoying purist.  "f is strict" means "f _|_ =
> _|_", so strictness is a semantic idea, not an operational one.
> Optimizations can change operation, but must preserve semantics.
>
> But I'm not just picking a fight.  I'm trying to promote equational
> reasoning over operational reasoning in the community, since I believe
> that is Haskell's primary strength.

Maybe I missed the point, but the optimization seems correct to me. 
Without optimization and its (strictness) analysis the program would still 
output the correct answer - given that the stack is sufficiently large. 
Optimization simply makes this program run using much less space. Right?