[Haskell-cafe] Preventing sharing

[Joachim Durchholz]

Am 22.12.2015 um 13:31 schrieb Oleg:
>
> But do read the next paragraph and the rest of the paper, and other
> articles on the web site
>          http://okmij.org/ftp/continuations/PPYield/index.html

I have to say I almost stopped reading at "worst in lazy evaluation: its 
incompatibility with effects".
Incompatibility with side effects is a good thing, so that's not 
"worst", and there are frameworks for doing effects (most notably IO), 
so there goes "incompatibility".

> Our conclusion is that the modularity benefit of lazy evaluation can
> be held without lazy evaluation, gaining the predictability of the
> space and time behavior.

I just skimmed the paper, so correct me if I'm wrong.

It seems to show how one can transform a specific class of lazy 
functions into generators.
This seems to miss the point of laziness. Having lazy evaluation means 
that when writing a function, you don't know (and don't care) how much 
of the returned data structure is ever explored, that's the caller's 
decision. This means you do not ever transform your code as a generator, 
because you don't need to.

As I said, I didn't do more than a quick scan, and I might be in error 
thinking it's a transformation just for a specific class of lazy functions.
More importantly, I might have missed some essential point about how 
this isn't really a transformation, or that one does not need to 
transform the code to get a transformer out.

So... please correct the omissions :-)

Regards,
Jo