[Haskell-cafe] Non-recursive let [Was: GHC bug? Let with guards loops]

[Andreas Abel]

Hi Oleg,

just now I wrote a message to haskell-prime at haskell.org to propose a 
non-recursive let.  Unfortunately, the default let is recursive, so we 
only have names like let' for it.  I also mentioned the ugly workaround 
(<- return $) that I was shocked to see the first time, but use myself 
sometimes now.

Cheers,
Andreas

On 10.07.2013 09:34, oleg at okmij.org wrote:
> Andreas wrote:
>> The greater evil is that Haskell does not have a non-recursive let.
>> This is source of many non-termination bugs, including this one here.
>> let should be non-recursive by default, and for recursion we could have
>> the good old "let rec".
>
> Hear, hear! In OCaml, I can (and often do) write
>
>          let (x,s) = foo 1 [] in
>          let (y,s) = bar x s in
>          let (z,s) = baz x y s in ...
>
> In Haskell I'll have to uniquely number the s's:
>
>          let (x,s1)  = foo 1 [] in
>          let (y,s2)  = bar x s1 in
>          let (z,s3)  = baz x y s2 in ...
>
> and re-number them if I insert a new statement. BASIC comes to mind. I
> tried to lobby Simon Peyton-Jones for the non-recursive let a couple
> of years ago. He said, write a proposal. It's still being
> written... Perhaps you might want to write it now.
>
> In the meanwhile, there is a very ugly workaround:
>
>      test = runIdentity $ do
>       (x,s) <- return $ foo 1 []
>       (y,s) <- return $ bar x s
>       (z,s) <- return $ baz x y s
>       return (z,s)
>
> After all, bind is non-recursive let.
>
>
>


-- 
Andreas Abel  <><      Du bist der geliebte Mensch.

Theoretical Computer Science, University of Munich
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andreas.abel at ifi.lmu.de
http://www2.tcs.ifi.lmu.de/~abel/