[Haskell-cafe] is value evaluated?

[Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH]

On May 8, 2009, at 13:08 , Sittampalam, Ganesh wrote:
> Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH wrote:
>> and therefore must be in IO.  You may be thinking that it would
>> return a result for _|_, but as described if you fed it _|_ it could
>> only produce False (if the _|_ has been evaluated you would not be
>> able to reach the test).
>
> It could probably return True in GHC since you can catch exceptions.
> That still doesn't mean it solves the halting problem, of course.

Unless it catches exceptions itself (which strikes me as a bad idea;  
it becomes a trivial way to ignore exceptions, leading to bad  
programming practices) either they're handled inside the _|_ (in which  
case it isn't _|_ from the standpoint of our test) or in an outer  
scope (in which case our test produces _|_ from the standpoint of the  
exception handler).

-- 
brandon s. allbery [solaris,freebsd,perl,pugs,haskell] allbery at kf8nh.com
system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] allbery at ece.cmu.edu
electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university    KF8NH


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