[Haskell-cafe] Re: A guess on stack-overflows - thunksbuild-upand tail recursion

[Duane Johnson]

I just found out about GHood through this thread, and since it  
impressed me very much to see something so cool, I feel bad making  
this comment... but I am always disturbed by the flickering effect  
produced by java applets in my browser (FF 3.0) while scrolling.  From  
an implementation standpoint this is obviously a nitpick, but from a  
designer standpoint it nearly single-handedly kills any prospect of my  
putting it up on a page.

With that said, I think the canvas+js idea is a wonderful alternative  
to proprietary Flash.

Regards,
Duane Johnson

On Mar 20, 2009, at 5:36 PM, Claus Reinke wrote:

>> It would be great to have a video of this in action up on youtube.
>> You can simply 'recordmydesktop' on linux (and likely elsewhere),  
>> then
>> upload the result.
>
> I'm curious: how would a non-interactive animation running in Flash
> in a browser be better than an interactive animation running in Java
> in a browser?-) When I wrote GHood (many years ago), I explicitly
> looked into the applet option, in the hope that people would use it
> to document and discuss observation logs of their favourite Haskell
> strictness issues, with animations available on their web pages, right
> next to the discussions.
> That hasn't happened yet (the only users I was aware of were the
> DrHylo/Pointless Haskell project), but I just checked, the old .jar  
> file,
> the source of which hasn't been perused for a long time, still  
> worked in applet mode (in Opera, a browser I didn't know about in  
> 2001,
> using a Java Runtime several versions removed from that time - try
> that in Haskell.. ;-), straight from that old project page (which  
> also explains how to set such things up), so anyone could add  
> animations of their favourite examples on their web-pages. But don't  
> let that keep you or anyone else from addressing the youtube  
> audience (one could add audio explanations, I guess).
>
> Claus
>
> PS. Perhaps these days, someone should rewrite the log viewer
>   in Canvas+JavaScript as a more lightweight and modern platform.
>
>> It also helps the general adoption cause, having Haskell more visible
>> and accessible.
>> claus.reinke:
>>>>> The problem occurs when the result value is needed and thus  
>>>>> the   thunks need to be reduced, starting with the outermost,  
>>>>> which can't   be reduced without reducing the next one .... etc  
>>>>> and it's these   reduction steps that are pushed on the stack  
>>>>> until its size cause a   stack-overflow.
>>>>
>>>> Yes, that's exactly right, and something that's not often pointed  
>>>> out.
>>>
>>> Btw, this is kind of relative strictness (when is one part of my  
>>> program
>>> needed to answer demands on another part) is the kind of example
>>> for which old GHood can be helpful (once you get used to the  
>>> display).
>>>
>>> If you have Java on your machines, try installing GHood [1] (on  
>>> hackage thanks to Hugo Pacheco), then things like
>>>
>>> ghc -e ':m +Debug.Observe' -e 'printO $ observe "foldr" foldr (+)  
>>> 0 [1..4] '
>>> ghc -e ':m +Debug.Observe' -e "printO $ observe \"foldl'\"  
>>> foldl' (+) 0 [1..4] "
>>> ghc -e ':m +Debug.Observe' -e 'printO $ observe "foldl" foldl (+)  
>>> 0 [1..4] '
>>>
>>> This was also among the examples on the GHood home page [2], so  
>>> you could try the applet version instead, and in section 4.2 of  
>>> the paper [3] (as a "well known strictness problem";-). Page and  
>>> paper
>>> mention a few other similar examples and discuss some differences
>>> between static (which parts are needed at all) and dynamic  
>>> strictness
>>> (which parts are needed when, relative to other demands).
>>>
>>> Claus
>>>
>>> [1] http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/GHood
>>> [2] http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/~cr3/toolbox/haskell/GHood
>>> [3] http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/~cr3/publications/GHood.html
>>>
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