[Haskell-cafe] An interesting paper from Google

[wren ng thornton]

On 10/16/10 8:25 PM, Dan Doel wrote:
> On Saturday 16 October 2010 7:04:23 pm Ben Millwood wrote:
>> On Fri, Oct 15, 2010 at 9:28 PM, Andrew Coppin  wrote:
>>> I'm still quite
>>> surprised that there's no tool anywhere which will trivially print out
>>> the reduction sequence for executing an expression. You'd think this
>>> would be laughably easy, and yet nobody has done it yet.
>>
>> I tried to do something a bit like this:
>>
>> http://github.com/benmachine/stepeval
>>
>> but it could be charitably described as "crude": has three failing
>> testcases and a bagful of unimplemented functionality.
>
> I believe the Buddha debugger could do something like this, [...]
> If someone were to revive it, I'm sure many people would be appreciative.

I've been wanting something like this recently. Or more particularly, 
I've been wanting a partial evaluator somewhat like Coq's simpl tactic 
(and lazy, cbv, red, hnf,...), which can look up the definitions of 
functions to inline them and continue evaluation, and which can work 
around variables and thus under lambdas. Though it would be nice to be 
able to dump the whole sequence instead of just the result.

/me wonders how much time it'd suck away to actually implement it...

-- 
Live well,
~wren