The way forever is implemented is a bit obtuse. It's mainly a hack to make
GHC's optimizer avoid space leaking no matter what the surrounding code is.
You can think of the implementation as just:
forever :: Monad m => m a -> m b
forever act = do
act
forever act
which is pretty much what you'd do in an imperative language, so it's not
that crazy.
You can see the similarity if you replace the do notation with manual binds
and rename 'act' to 'a':
forever :: Monad m => m a -> m b
forever a = a >> forever a
Again, the knot tying stuff is just to prevent a space leak in certain
optimization scenarios.
On Mon, Dec 23, 2013 at 9:02 PM, Eduardo Sato
Hello, guys.
Recently I came across the definition of the function 'forever' on hoogle. I am intrigued that it works.
The recursive definition does make sense to me in a mathematical way, but I can't figure out how it works under the hood in terms of thunks.
To tell you the truth, I don't know how laziness works in general in haskell.
Can someone help me understand how it works in this example, and give some pointers to materials on the subject?
The "tying the knot" article on the wiki is pretty mind bending too.
-- | @'forever' act@ repeats the action infinitely.
forever :: (Monad m) => m a -> m b
{-# INLINE forever #-}forever a = let a' = a >> a' in a'
--
Eduardo Sato
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