Hi, I'm puzzled whether it is feasible to use existing NFData instances for exception ordering. Here is some code that won't work: return $!! 'a' : throw exceptionA throwIO exceptionB Here GHC makes a non-deterministic choice between exceptionA and exceptionB. The reason is that the standard DeepSeq instances use `seq`, and `seq` does not help with exception ordering**. I tried several things (ghc-7.4.2 with -O2), and the following seems to order the exceptions for this particular case: (evaluate . force) ('a' : throw exceptionA) throwIO exceptionB But I'm a little bit worried that this may not hold in general, e.g. (return $!! 'a' : throw exceptionA) >>= evaluate throwIO exceptionB results in exceptionB. I think my main issue here is that I do not properly understand how seq and seq# (which is used by evaluate) do interact with each other. And how I can reason about code that uses both. The question is really whether it is "somehow" feasible to use existing NFData instances to order exceptions. Or would we need to define a separate type class + instances for that, e.g.: class DeepEvaluate a where deepEvaluate :: a -> IO a deepEvaluate = evaluate instance DeepEvaluate Char where instance DeepEvaluate a => DeepEvaluate [a] where deepEvaluate = mapM deepEvaluate If you have any related ideas or thoughts, I'd love to hear about them. Cheers, Simon ** This is desired behavior, see the discussion at http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/5129