Hi, today while mowing the lawn, I thought how to statically prevent some problems with infinte lists. I was wondering if it is possible to somehow mark a list as one of finite/infinite/unknown and to mark list-processing functions as whether they can handle infinte lists. For example, it is known that a list produced by repeat or cycle is always infinte, that foldl can’t handle infinte lists (while foldr might). length should never be called on an infinte list, and map’s output is infinite iff the input list is. So the compiler might use this information to emit errors like “line 42: program will not terminate: length applied to infinite list” or warnings “line 23: termination not guaranteed: foldl applied to possible infinte list”. I guess you can’t know it for all lists (halting problem...), but for those where it is possible, it would be nice to tell. Or am I missing something? Can this be implemented using some guru type system hacking? Greetings, Joachim -- Joachim "nomeata" Breitner mail: mail@joachim-breitner.de | ICQ# 74513189 | GPG-Key: 4743206C JID: joachimbreitner@amessage.de | http://www.joachim-breitner.de/ Debian Developer: nomeata@debian.org