[Haskell-cafe] Learn You a Haskell for Great Good - a few doubts

[Alexander Solla]

On Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 3:38 PM, Alexander Solla <alex.solla at gmail.com>wrote:

>
>
> This can be detected by seq: the left-hand side doesn't terminate, whereas
>> the right-hand side does. And moreover, this can mess up other things (e.g.,
>> monads) by introducing too much laziness. Space leaks are quite a serious
>> matter and they have nothing to do with trying to compare uncomputable
>> values. Do you want a seemingly insignificant refactoring to cause your
>> program to suddenly hang forever? Or to take up gobs more space than it used
>> to?
>>
>
> 'seq' is not a "function", since it breaks referential transparency and
> possibly extensionality in function composition.  By construction, "seq a b
> = b", and yet "seq undefined b /= b".  Admittedly, the Haskell report and
> the GHC implementation, diverge on this issue.  Haskell98 specifically
> defines seq in terms of a comparison with bottom, whereas GHC "merely"
> reduces the first argument to WHNF.  In any case, the reduction is a side
> effect, with which can lead to inconsistent semantics if 'seq' is included
> in "the language".
>
> It is nice to know that we can work in a consistent language if we avoid
> certain constructs, such as 'seq', 'unsafePerformIO', and probably others.
>  In addition to making the "core language" conceptually simpler, it means
> that we can be sure we aren't inadvertently destroying the correctness
> guarantees introduced by the Howard-Curry correspondence theorem.
>
>
As a matter of fact, if you read GHC.Prim, you will see that seq is a
bottom!

seq :: a -> b -> b
seq = let x = x in x

The "magic" semantics of evaluating the first argument are done by the
compiler/runtime, and are apparently not expressible in Haskell.  This is
true of
inline
lazy
unsafeCoerce

and dozens of others, all of which are expressed as specialized types with
the same equation:
let x = x in x
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