[Haskell-cafe] Laziness enhances composability: an example

Simon Richard Clarkstone simon.clarkstone at gmail.com
Fri Jul 10 21:21:09 EDT 2009


Thomas Davie wrote:
> On 9 Jul 2009, at 14:55, Cristiano Paris wrote:
>> I'm wondering what a good example of why laziness enhances 
>> composability would be.
>>
>> I'm specifically looking for something that can't implemented in 
>> Python with iterators (at least not elegantly), but can actually be 
>> implemented in Haskell.
> 
> Pretty much anything that uses "tying the knot" is very difficult to 
> implement in a non-lazy language without a lot of indirection.

I disagree; mutation can work rather well instead.

One application I work on has to parse input containing items with 
forward and backward references using keys into a graph of objects, a 
classic tying-the-knot problem.  However, we are not using a lazy 
language, so have only one procedure to create or look up the object 
corresponding to an item, by key.  Parsing references to an item will 
just store the returned address, but parsing the definition of an item 
will mutate the object to fill in the data.  The effect is that all the 
references end up as pointers to the right objects, and the objects for 
undefined items end up keeping their default values (caught by later 
checks).

Situations like that make either mutation or laziness very handy, and if 
one cannot imagine the "tying the knot" technique then mutation looks 
like the only good way.  No wonder people don't "get" pure FP! ;-)

-- 
src/


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