Hello,

> For example, the natural and naive way to write Andrew's "mean" function
> doesn't involve tuples at all: simply tail recurse with two accumulator
> parameters, and compute the mean at the end.  GHC's strictness analyser
> does the right thing with this, so there's no need for seq, $!, or the
> like.  It's about 3 lines of code.
>
Is this the code you mean?

    meanNat = go 0 0 where
        go s n [] = s / n
        go s n (x:xs) = go (s+x) (n+1) xs

If so, bang patterns are still required bang patterns in ghc-6.8.2 to run in constant memory:

    meanNat = go 0 0 where
        go s n [] = s / n
        go !s !n (x:xs) = go (s+x) (n+1) xs

Is there some other way to write it so that ghc will essentially insert the bangs for me?

-Jeff


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