[Haskell-cafe] Re: If wishes were horses... (was: Re: definition of sum)

[David Virebayre]

On Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 10:29 AM, Johannes Waldmann
<waldmann at imn.htwk-leipzig.de> wrote:

> Well, meaningful identifier names is nice, but I think
> here we have a case of the code smell "type info embedded in the name".
> Strictness of a function should be expressed in the function's type instead.
> But that seems impossible with Haskell at the moment.
> (At best, we can express strictness of constructors?)
> Hence we have "underspecified" behaviour:
>
> Prelude Data.List> :t foldl'
> foldl' :: (a -> b -> a) -> a -> [b] -> a
>
> Prelude Data.List> :t foldl
> foldl :: (a -> b -> a) -> a -> [b] -> a

Even if we had a syntax to express that the function is strict,
wouldn't we still need two distinct function names for the strict and
lazy case ? In that case, some sort of convention on naming is nice,
because if I want to change a function to its strict version, I know
there's a good chance it's the one that ends with a '

David.
>
> and need to resort to the awkward workaround via naming conventions.
>
> Of course Haskell implementations do have some kind of strictness
> information (e.g., in ghc interface files), so it's not impossible
> to define some kind of annotation system.
>
> Although I did not check what the compiler's strictness info is
> for foldl and fold' - and what was actually needed (at the source level).
> The current textual definition (Data.List API docs: "foldl' = a
> strict version of foldl") is not too precise, either.
>
> Well, I guess there's a huge design space. But it's a huge problem
> (describing/controlling the behaviour of lazy programs).
>
> Best - J.W.
>
>
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