when performing strictness/abscence/one-shot analysis, are rule bodies taken into account?
No.
like, would the following cause trouble making const no longer absent in its second argument?
const x y = x
{-# RULE "const/seq" forall a b . const a b = seq b a #-}
by trouble I mean the compiler failing or producing bad code in some way, rather than the obvious trouble of changing the meaning of const.
No, because of the worker/wrapper transform. You can think of strictness analysis as doing something like this in this case: const x y = x => const x y = constW x constW x = let y = error "entered absent argument!" in x (of course, strictness analysis only does the work of determining that const is absent in its second argument, and the worker/wrapper transform phase is a separate pass that happens later.) So, from then on, GHC will inline const wherever possible, and the rule "const/seq" will no longer be applicable, because it applies to const, not constW. Note that even if const doesn't end up getting inlined for some reason, the presence of the rule doesn't cause any problems. It's perfectly valid to replace (const a b) with (constW a) or with (seq b a).
it is noted in the deforestation papers that rules can change the sharing properties of code and we are okay with that. I was wondering if they could safely change the strictness or abscence properties of code as well?
Given the example above, I think it's fairly safe to say that rules can safely change strictness and absence properties, or at least "safe" in the sense that it shouldn't cause the compiler to crash or to generate code that crashes. (Since even GHC's strictness analysis on its own, ignoring the presence of rules, hasn't been formally proven correct yet, I'm being rather hand-wavy in saying that.) But, it is kind of weird to have a rule that changes these properties. I realize the example you gave is just for the sake of argument, but I can't think of a real situation where you'd want to have a rule that changed strictness properties (rather than expressing the strictness you wanted in the code), though I'm open to being convinced otherwise. Cheers, Kirsten -- Kirsten Chevalier* chevalier@alum.wellesley.edu *Often in error, never in doubt "I flip on the television and watch sad movies / And look for sad sick people like me" -- Tegan and Sara