| > In ghc-5.00.1, "seq (2/0) 3" gives 3. Should it not give | error. Hugs does. | | I suspect that Hugs is wrong and ghc is right in this case. | Certainly nhc98 and hbc agree with ghc's behaviour. | | seq x y means evaluate x to whnf and throw away the result, | returning y instead. It shouldn't matter whether the result | of x is bottom. This doesn't seem a correct explaination to me. seq _|_ anything == _|_ The reason that it doesn't bomb in GHCi, and I presume nhc98 and hbc is because the type of (2/0) is Fractional a => a, which is defaulted to Double. However, 2/0 :: Double is a well defined value -- an IEEE754 Infinity (try it)! I think what Saswat expected to see can be made to happen if you force the division to be an integer division: Prelude> seq (2 `div` 0) 3 Floating point exception cam-02-unx:~$ J