[Haskell-cafe] Bad recursion? When can something be on both sides of an equation?

[Jeffrey Brown]

Dear Haskellers,

In another thread [1], I talked about computing what I've been lately
calling the "total descendents" of a subset S of a graph: that is, the set
of nodes t for which every maximal sequence of predecessors intersects S. I
got it done, functionally [2]. But in the process I wrote something that
hangs, and I can't figure out why.

The problem arose in the following passage. (Glab stands for Graph Label, a
synonym for Int.)

    totalDescendents :: S.Set Glab -> Graph -> S.Set Glab
    totalDescendents roots graph = b
      where (a,b,c,graph) = totalDescendentsCtrlr  -- tricky
                            (roots, S.empty, M.empty, graph)

    totalDescendentsCtrlr :: TotalDescendentsData -> TotalDescendentsData
    totalDescendentsCtrlr (a,b,c,gr) =
      if S.null a' -- fails, as does a == a'
        -- a == a' is one iteration slower but should have same effect
        then                       (a',b',c',gr')
        else totalDescendentsCtrlr (a',b',c',gr')
      where (a',b',c',gr') = visitUndetPrds $ visitTdSnvSucs (a,b,c,gr)

Notice that in the equation marked "tricky", the object "graph" appears on
both sides. I thought that was the problem, so I rewrote that line as the
following:
      where (_,b,_,_) = totalDescendentsCtrlr
and sure enough, the problem vanished.

So I tried to distill that problem to something tiny, and came up with this:

  f (a) = a'
    where (a',b) = fBackend (a,b) -- tricky

  fBackend (a,b) =
    if a' < 1
      then          (a',b)
      else fBackend (a',b)
    where a' = a - 1

I see no substantive difference between the problem with the first body of
code and the problem I expected f and fBackend to have -- but f and
fBackend work fine!

Any idea what might be happening?

Thanks,
Jeff


[1] http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/115353
[2]
https://github.com/JeffreyBenjaminBrown/digraphs-on-text/blob/master/TotalDescendents.hs
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/attachments/20150312/bd1b2480/attachment.html>