Junior White
Hi Artyom, Thanks! But I don't understand why in the first case "queens' (k-1)" is being recomputed n times?
Because your list comprehension is just a syntactic sugar for concatMap (\q -> concatMap (\qs -> if isSafe q qs then [q:qs] else []) (queens' (k-1))) [1..n] Here `queens' (k-1)` does not depend on `qs`, and therefore it *could* be floated out of the lambda: let queens = queens' (k-1) in concatMap (\q -> concatMap (\qs -> if isSafe q qs then [q:qs] else []) queens) [1..n] But it is an unsafe optimisation. Suppose that the `queens` list is very big. If we apply this optimisation, it will be retained in memory during the whole evaluation, which may be not desirable. That’s why GHC leaves this to you.