Fwd: lazier writer monad

[Tristan Wibberley]

Dear Haskell Libraries mailing list members,

I've submitted a merge request for an increase in the laziness of the
writer monad: https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/merge_requests/1262 and it
requires discussion via this mailing list.

The link above includes an example of the motivation for this change and I
hope you can all extrapolate to see the importance of this change,
sufficient to not only accept this but to be moved to add a language flag,
available within the content of a module's source file, to match unique
constructors lazily throughout a module that uses it, lifting _|_ to the
next least-defined value.

The core problem is that for the most handy and practical library
interfaces, we need function results to be as well-defined as possible
before a strict pattern match is required to choose between two
constructors/values. There are several parts to providing that but one
important part is that elements of patterns that cannot be unmatched should
be lazily matched so the function's definition can be used without
evaluating the function's arguments first. This avoids having to train
users to always avoid patterns except after a let binding which would
otherwise be necessary to establish a standard habit to lazily pattern
match so the user base encourages each other to make their functions
maximally useful.

--
Tristan
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