Generally, a form of lenient evaluation + lazy data structures can provide the benefits of Haskell non-strict evaluation without the drawbacks. A "reimagining" of Haskell cast in this mold might make for a very practical thesis. Regards, John A. De Goes N-Brain, Inc. The Evolution of Collaboration http://www.n-brain.net | 877-376-2724 x 101 On Nov 4, 2009, at 7:29 PM, Shelby Moore wrote:
Hello, -Cafe,
I'm looking for an interesting topic to hack on in my thesis.
The thesis should be rather "theoretical"/abstract (writing a mail client in Haskell is not, for example), dealing with FP or related fields.
The theoretical concept of how to make lazy evaluation less discontinuously correlated to allocation space determinism:
http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2009-November/ 068436.html http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/cvs-ghc/2009-October/050928.html http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/cvs-ghc/2009-November/050946.html http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/cvs-ghc/2009-November/050949.html (should have written "stochastic" instead of "statistical")
I think this would make you a hero also if you succeed, as I see this problem as the main problem stopping its adoption as a mainstream language.
The problem as I see it (Google "space leak Haskell" for examples), is that even a very small change in the code can cause a huge space leak that slows the program to molasses due to paging (faults) load. And these effects are not predictable or easy to reason about. When these discontinuous effects occur, we have to stop our development, do profiling, and try to isolate the obscure cause, then restructure code in bizzarre ways to try to get some determinism in space allocation.
My abstract idea is that it should be possible to stochastically throttle these effects, by throtting whether (and whic) thunks get cached to (WH)NF or re-valuated on each use.
I do think it is possible to teach people how to program in FP succinctly and without making their head hurt:
http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2009-November/ 068564.html
You may not find many people here openly expressing their interest in these topics, but I think there are millions of people out there who would benefit. _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe