[Haskell-cafe] Re: Suggested algorithm to control upper bound of space "leaks"

Shelby Moore shelby at coolpage.com
Sun Nov 1 23:15:14 EST 2009


This is an opportunity cost minimization problem:

http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2009-November/068435.html

One of the worst (most unoptimized and conflated) solutions is to force
some determinism at the low-level language architecture specifically
targetted to achieve determinism in some domain at the higher level (which
actually doesn't achieve it as the aliasing error gets pushed around any
way).  It analogous to pulling all your teeth out so you won't get
cavities, considering the power that lazy evaluation and pure referential
transparency adds to algorithm expression, composability, OOP,
optimization opportunities (in many domains, e.g. speed, algorithmic
resonance, concurrency, etc):

http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2009-November/068432.html

Thus my analysis so far is Haskell has it correct, and I am suggesting the
missing optimization is to let us automatically put an upper bound on the
space non-determinism (the topic of this thread), then the programmer can
optimize beyond that with profiling and strategy placement of seq and type
constraints[1].

[1]Hudak, Hughes, Peyton Jones, Wadler (2007). "A History of Haskell:
being lazy with class" (¶32 §10.3, "Controlling evaluation order" and ¶32
§10.2, "Space profiling")


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