I was surprised when I read the multi-core section of Real World Haskell which explains the use of par, seq, and force to achieve parallelism. While it's obvious a programmer could provide useful parallelism hints to the compiler, given the nature of the language I would have thought Haskell could do a significant amount of parallelism itself without any hints or code changes at all. I am thinking of our troglodytic friend 'make', which will run (for example) 4 parallel jobs when given the option "make -j4". Even 'rake', the ruby version of make, now has a branch (called drake) which does the parallel -j option. Since much of Haskell code is free of side effects, it would seem that it can be analyzed in similar manner to Makefile dependencies in order to find sections which can be run in parallel. What would it take to implement a -j equivalent for, say, GHC? Or if this is not possible, what is wrong with my reasoning? Thanks, TW