[Haskell-cafe] Maintaining laziness

[Jan Christiansen]

Hi,

> Although it seems to be overkill for a single module - How about a  
> cabalized version on Hackage and a darcs repository? It would  
> simplify using and updating it.

I am not sure whether this would be a good idea. The original version  
makes a lot of suggestions which are not satisfiable but it is not at  
all trivial to decide which are satisfiable and which are not. I have  
rewritten StrictCheck from scratch to overcome this problem. But the  
current implementation is not presentable right now and I have no  
formal prove that the criterion that I am using is correct.

> Your StrictCheck is really tough! I'm currently checking my  
> routines from
>  http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/utility-ht/0.0.1/doc/ 
> html/Data-List-HT.html
>   which I designed especially with laziness in mind - and I found a  
> lot of laziness breakers using StrictCheck!
>
>  However now I found an example where it probably proposes  
> something inefficient:
>
> So what it proposes is essentially that one should first check the  
> length of the lists without looking at the contents.  
> [undefined,undefined] can never be a prefix of [undefined].  
> However, first constructing the list spine seems to be inefficient.

I know about this problem. It is mentioned in the paper about  
StrictCheck. I haven't worked on this right now. With respect to  
least-strictness I would say the tool is right. But it is probably  
not the kind of advise one wants. When I am sure that I can handle  
the other problem I will take a look at this one.

Cheers, Jan