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

[jan.h.xie at gmail.com]

* Evan Laforge <qdunkan at gmail.com> [2009-01-04 16:19:38 +0800]:

> > 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:

Very clear explanation, thanks Evan :-)

-- 
jan=callcc{|jan|jan};jan.call(jan)
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