droundy:
In any case, in my opinion Haskell desperately needs more strict data types, as strict types can go a long way towards eliminating all sorts of
Yes! Haskell is a combined strict and lazy language, after all. In particular, the ability to precisely combine strictness and laziness in a single data structure (e.g. Data.ByteString.Lazy) leads to some really nice applications difficult to realise in a fully strict language. There's a small beginnings of a 'strict' Data.* here, http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/strict-0.1 Some additions to that could be useful.
pain. I remember once going through all sorts of pain trying to avoid stack overflows when using Data.Map to compute a histogram, which all would have been avoided if there were a strict version of Data.Map (or even just strict functions on the lazy Data.Map). I don't think eliminating all laziness is a good idea, but (optional) strict datatypes most certainly are, as they can go a very long ways towards eliminating memory leaks.
Quite so. I can imagine some useful variants of Data.Map.Strict/Lazy/... -- Don