
Hi guys. I'm writing a simple interpretter for a small extended-lambda-calculus sort of language. And I'd just like to say... RECURSIVE LET-BINDS! GAAAAH!!! >_< No other part of the program has consumed nearly as much brain power as me trying to figure out when it is and isn't safe to replace a variable with its RHS. To illustrate: let x = f x; y = 5 in x y A simple-minded interpretter might try to replace every occurrance of "x" with "f x". This yields let y = 5 in (f x) y ...and x is now a free variable. OOPS! Trying to tease out exactly under which conditions you can and cannot perform the substitution is utterly maddening. Since this is a Haskell mailing list and as such it is populated by vast numbers of people with PhDs and so forth... does anybody happen to know the *correct* solution to this conundrum? Before I become clinically insane...? o_O By the way... To all those people who work on projects like GHC and so on, who have to get this stuff right "for real": you have my infinite respect!