[Haskell-cafe] How to check object's identity?

[Evan Laforge]

> Although equal? treats the two as the *same*, they're different lists
> because if we modify one (e.g by set-car!) the other won't be affected.
>
> So here comes another question: when we say a function always give the
> same output for the same input, what the *same* means here? ídentity
> or equality?

If you don't have set-car!, then identity and equality are impossible
to differentiate.  And haskell doesn't have set-car!.

However, as was noted, it does have something like mutable pointers
via IORef, and sure enough, you can do pointer comparisons with them:

h <- newIORef 12
h' <- newIORef 12
print $ h == h --> True
print $ h == h' --> False

Since they're pointers, to compare by value you have to explicitly
derefence them:

print =<< liftM2 (==) (readIORef h) (readIORef h') --> True


If you're wondering about the implementation of "(1:[], 1:[])", ghc
might be smart enough to do CSE in this case and hence use the same
memory for both lists, but in general CSE doesn't happen to avoid
accidental recomputation.  There's some stuff in the ghc manual about
lambda and let lifting that describes when CSE will and won't happen.
I wouldn't count on it in general, but I don't read core well enough
to tell.  Maybe someone who knows more about core can help me here:

a =
  \ (eta_azv :: State# RealWorld) ->
    case a24 stdout lvl7 eta_azv
    of wild_aFu { (# new_s_aFw, a103_aFx #) ->
    $wa13 stdout '\n' new_s_aFw
    }

There are lots of apparently undefined variables, like the function
'a24'.  But it looks like the pair should come from 'lvl7', which is
chained all the way down to 'lvl' like so:

lvl :: Integer
lvl = S# 1

lvl1 :: [Integer]
lvl1 =
  : @ Integer lvl ([] @ Integer)

lvl2 :: ShowS
lvl2 = showList lvl1

lvl3 :: [ShowS]
lvl3 = : @ ShowS lvl2 ([] @ ShowS)

lvl4 :: [ShowS]
lvl4 = : @ ShowS lvl2 lvl3

lvl5 :: [Char]
lvl5 = : @ Char a2 ([] @ Char)

lvl6 :: String
lvl6 =
  foldr1
    @ (String -> String) lvl16 lvl4 lvl5

lvl7 :: [Char]
lvl7 = : @ Char a lvl6

So it *looks* like there's only one list created in 'lvl1', but I
can't see where it's turning into a tuple, and I don't understand the
' = : ' stuff, as in 'lvl5 = : @ Char a2 ([] @ Char)'.  'lvl5' is a
Char resulting from the application of 'a2' to ""?

The code, btw, was 'main = print (1:[], 1:[])'.