On Tue, 19 Apr 2005 16:37:13 +0200, Santoemma Enrico
I've always thought that compilers for functional languages were able to recognize tail recursion and to transform it into a loop. So, why this line eats all my machine's memory (and then runs out of stack space)?
sum [1..10000000] -- ten millions
The definition of 'sum' in the standard library is too lazy. Try: mysum l = sum' l 0 where sum' [] a = a sum' (x:xs) a = let s = a+x in s `seq` sum' xs s Perhaps someone with a better understanding can explain why the 'sum' in the library is defined the way it is (the standard defines it based on foldl, which is also lazy). Is there a valid program that can demonstrate a difference between 'mysum' and the library's 'sum' function? Dave