Thank you Tom, Niklas, Nicolas and Stuart,
Calculating the length was just an illustration - what I really need to do is parse the file. Anyway, it is clear that String for IO is a bad idea - I wonder if examples of String based readFile etc for beginners is a good idea or not.
Regards,
Kashyap


On Tue, Jun 24, 2014 at 10:44 PM, Tom Ellis <tom-lists-haskell-cafe-2013@jaguarpaw.co.uk> wrote:
On Tue, Jun 24, 2014 at 10:37:35PM +0530, C K Kashyap wrote:
> Thanks Nicholas :) ... and if I understand right doing `seq` would be
> equivalent to Strict IO that Darren mentioned. right?

It's probably best to think of them as distinct.

Strict IO roughly means the whole file will be read at once so the file
handle can be released.  On the other hand `seq`ing the `length` forces the
calculation of the length so the file is read completely and the file handle
can be released.  They have similar outcomes but the means of achieving them
is different.

Tom
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