seq / strictness and laziness

Hal Daume hdaume@ISI.EDU
Mon, 12 Nov 2001 08:58:06 -0800 (PST)


Dean Herington wrote:
>
> `seq` forces evaluation of only the top-level construct in its first
> argument.  (($!) similarly for its second argument.)  I would guess your
> "newcounts" are structured (probably a tuple or list), in which case you are
> not forcing evaluation deeply enough.  See
> http://haskell.org/pipermail/haskell/2001-August/001581.html and followup
> article.     

As someone who also had this problem a while ago, I'm curious
why DeepSeq never made it into the Libraries.  This would, imo,
be something quite generally useful (and it would be really nice
to be able to derive it).

 - Hal