Re: [Haskell-cafe] Haskell maximum stack depth

On Mon, 2008-01-28 at 14:39 -0500, istarex wrote:

On Jan 28, 2008 1:07 PM, Neil Mitchell wrote:

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To answer the question if Haskell has a "stack depth restriction ... like Java" the answer is no. It has a stack depth restriction, but its absolutely nothing like Java in the way it uses the stack, so you can't compare them. Fair enough.

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My guess is that Istarex's inner thought might have been along the lines of "in Java if I do too much recursion I get a stack overflow, but Haskell only has recursion, does that mean I get into stack overflows all the time?". I could of course be entirely wrong ;-) Well, it wasn't quite that simplistic :-). I was considering a specifically non-tail recursive solution to a problem, and I was wondering if Haskell has an artificial recursion depth limit. I didn't stop to consider laziness, and I now realize there's a whole dimension of this question that I didn't consider. Thanks for the input guys.

You may want to look at http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Stack_overflow While perhaps for a simple throw-away program it may be beneficial to write code that allocates unnecessary stack, I personally consider unnecessary stack use a bug. A stack overflow, to me, is always indicative of a bug.