[Haskell-cafe] Lifting strictness to types

[Tom Ellis]

On Thu, Aug 22, 2013 at 12:51:24PM -0300, Thiago Negri wrote:
> How hard would it be to lift strictness annotations to type-level? E.g.
> instead of
> f :: Int -> Int
> f !x = x + 1
> write
> f :: !Int -> Int
> f x = x + 1
> which would have the same effect. At least it would be transparent to the
> developer using a particular function.

See also the recent Reddit thread

    http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/1ksu0v/reasoning_about_space_leaks_with_space_invariants/cbsac5m

where I and others considered the possibility of a strict language with
explicit thunk datatype.  NB OCaml essentially already has this

    http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/manual-ocaml/libref/Lazy.html

but I think Haskellers would do it better because we have a lot of
experience with purity, laziness and monad and comonad transformers.

Tom