Dear people and GHC team, I have a naive question about the compiler and library of ghc-6.12.3. Consider the program import List (genericLength) main = putStr $ shows (genericLength [1 .. n]) "\n" where n = -- 10^6, 10^7, 10^8 ... (1) When it is compiled under -O, it runs in a small constant space in n and in a time approximately proportional to n. (2) When it is compiled without -O, it takes at the run-time the stack proportional to n, and it takes enormousely large time for n >= 10^7. (3) In the interpreter mode ghci, `genericLength [1 .. n]' takes as much resource as (2). Are the points (2) and (3) natural for an Haskell implementation? Independently on whether lng is inlined or not, its lazy evaluation is, probably, like this: lng [1 .. n] = lng (1 : (list 2 n)) = 1 + (lng $ list 2 n) = 1 + (lng (2: (list 3 n))) = 1 + 1 + (lng $ list 3 n) = 2 + (lng (3: (list 4 n))) -- because this "+" is of Integer = 2 + 1 + (lng $ list 4 n) = 3 + (lng $ list 4 n) ... And this takes a small constant space. Thank you in advance for your explanation, ----------------- Serge Mechveliani mechvel@botik.ru