Dean, George,

Would it be possible to bring the DeepSeq library into the libraries distributed with GHC? (I think Dean Herington is responsible for it.)

Of course it's easy enough to drop it into one's own program (I am just about to do this) but (1) It is fairly common to want to force deeper evaluation. (2) DeepSeq is simple enough to be dropped in the GHC distribution, without it causing much trouble or making it much bigger. (3) At the same time, it is not so simple that it can be reimplemented in a couple of lines.

We use 'Evaluation Strategies' to control evaluation in parallel and distributed Haskells. The 'rnf' (reduce to normal form) strategy is equivalent to DeepSeq, and the Strategies library is already available in GHC (-syslib concurrent). More details in Trinder P.W. Hammond K. Loidl H-W. Peyton Jones S.L. Algorithm + Strategy = Parallelism. Journal of Functional Programming, 8(1) (January 1998) pp~23-60. Phil -------------------------------------------------- Phil Trinder Department of Computing and Electrical Engineering Heriot Watt University Riccarton Edinburgh, EH14 4AS E-mail: trinder@cee.hw.ac.uk Teleph: +44 (0)131 451 3435 Depart: +44 (0)131 451 3328 Fasmly: +44 (0)131 451 3327 Intrnt: http://www.cee.hw.ac.uk/~trinder