[Haskell-cafe] Re: Re: semi-closed handles

Ryan Ingram wrote:

On 4/15/08, ChrisK wrote:

...

A small idiomatic nitpick: When I see (length s) gets computed and thrown away I wince at the wasted effort. I would prefer (finiteSpine s):

On every piece of hardware I've seen, the actual calculation done by "length" is basically free. Compared to the cache misses you'll get from traversing the list, or especially the disk access from reading the file, it's vanishingly small.

It's also directly from the prelude and it's usually pretty clear to a newbie what it's doing, as compared to "foldr (const id) () s" which is on the path to "functional languages make no sense" land. I consider myself moderately experienced, and assuming that it typechecks I know what it has to mean, but I can't just look at it and know what it does like I can with "length".

If there was a standard "seqList" or "deepSeq", I'd use that instead.

I am almost sure that there is something in Control.Parallel.Strategies that you can use (but too lazy to look it up now...) Cheers Ben