Just saying 'evaluate this CAF to WHNF' might only inline the outer combinator.
I'm not sure quite what you mean. However, it seems to me that this sort of thing would match the way other things happen in Haskell fairly well (i.e., default lazy, strictify as necessary). If you want something to be evaluated more deeply, make a CAF to do so, and then tell the compiler to evaluate that... I suspect even this very limited control would be useful for some applications that would otherwise have long and useless start-up times. On a more adventurous note, I think it would be very interesting to be able to ask the compiler to make certain values persistent across program executions. This could solve the same problem, but may also help deal with long computations that may be interrupted, and should be re-started at the same point. (actually, I think this would not be all that great... however, if non-trivial memo tables ever get added to GHC, it could be _very_ useful to store those across program runs for simulations... that way, if the program is given input 12, and told to calculate something with it and print it out, if the program is interrupted, and re-started with the same input, calculation could presumably start at the point it left off...). Of course, I have no clue how realistic any of this is. David Feuer This message has been brought to you by the letter alpha and the number pi.