Proposal: add laziness to Data.Map / IntMap

[Don Stewart]

sedillard:
>    Hi,
> 
>    I found myself wanting a lazy version of Data.Map today, and by "lazy" I
>    mean in the node-subtree pointers. I trust the library writers when they
>    put strictness annotations in the fields of the tree nodes, so I'm
>    wondering what the various implications of lazy subtrees are, beyond the
>    obvious speed hit. Does this cause space leaks beyond what lazy value
>    pointers can already cause? Can someone point me to some reading that
>    discusses this?
> 
>    Anyway, I'm positing to libraries (rather than haskell-cafe) to gauge
>    opinion about a possible rewrite of Data.Map and IntMap to remove
>    strictness annotations (bangs) from the node constructors and move them
>    into the functions (as seqs).  "Rewrite" is maybe too strong of a word.
>    "Significant patch" is more like it. It would involve only those functions
>    that construct Bin values directly, which is not that many. Less than a
>    days work, I think (yes that means I volunteer.)  Semantics of everything
>    remains unchanged, but it opens up the possibility for lazy versions of
>    some functions.

How about doing it as a separate library, then we can choose either
strict or lazy as the case may be?

-- Don