[Haskell] insufficiently laziness@pattern -- more counterintuitive stuff

[S. Alexander Jacobson]

I would assume that this function:

  foo list@(h:t) = list

is equivalent to

  foo list = list
     where (h:t)=list

But passing [] to the first generates an error
even though h and t are never used!  Passing [] to
the second works just fine.

At this point, I sort of understand the reason for
MR and not having partially applied type synonyms,
but this seems entirely like an issue of syntactic
sugar....

FYI, I encountered this issue attempting to write
code that merges the content of two lists of tuples e.g.

  merge left@((xL,yL):restL) right@((xR,yR):restR)
	| left==[] = ....

I imagine this issue is fairly common so perhaps
its another idiom issue.

-Alex-

PS This code is part of a joinSets function for data.Sets

_________________________________________________________________
S. Alexander Jacobson                  mailto:me at alexjacobson.com
tel:917-770-6565                       http://alexjacobson.com