"Simon Marlow"
Yes, I see. Would it be possible to have a standard strict list,
Yes, it would be possible, but we can't do it without making sweeping changes to standard libraries and deviating from Haskell 98 quite a bit. It's something to bear in mind should the topic of Haskell 2 come up, though.
Yes, I realise that. Perhaps it'd be possible to (for one particular module) override the default [] and (:) to use a strict-element list. I.e. import Prelude hiding... import StrictLists ... (The intention is to make *all* lists in that module strict) Anyway, I tried to rewrite my program to use custom-defined lists instead of []-type lists. Unfortunately, I ended up consuming vastly more space, and additionally needing a huge stack. And everything was a lot slower. I've probably messed up something, somewhere. Sigh. Thanks for all your help, though! -kzm -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants