[Haskell-cafe] is value evaluated?

[Don Stewart]

Andy Gill has been advocating programmatic access to the 'is evaluated'
status bit for years now. 'seq' becomes cheaper, and we can write
operational properties/assertions about strictness.

-- Don


jochem:
> Nikhil Patil wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I am curious to know if there is a function in Haskell to find if a
> certain
> > value has already been evaluated. The function I need would have the type:
> >
> >> (?!) :: a -> Bool
> 
> I will call this function `evaluated', since it is not a binary operator.
> 
> The existence of such a function would violate referential transparency.
> 
> What would the value of
> ( evaluated (fibs !! 100), evaluated (fibs !! 100) )
> be ? Suppose that I first print the `fst' of this tuple, then print the
> 101st Fibonacci nummber, and then print the `snd' of this tuple. By lazy
> evaluation, one would expect that this yields
> 
> False
> <the 101st Fibonacci number>
> True
> 
> but this violates referential transparency.
> 
> Cheers,
> -- 
> Jochem Berndsen | jochem at functor.nl
> GPG: 0xE6FABFAB
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