Doug,
Although I was puzzled about the context, I loved reading
your paper! So it was a happy mistake as far as I'm
concerned :-)
I found it fascinating to realize the equivalence between
processes connected by pipes and lazy lists with function
composition. And I'll definitely be adding that two-liner to
my repertoire of cool examples that I use when trying to
explain the virtues of lazy functional programming to others.
The other one that I use is the fairly well-known recursive
Fibonacci generation: fibonacci = 1 : 1 : zipWith (+)
fibonacci (tail fibonacci).
By the way, for your Try It section, you might want to consider
using
codepad.org, "an online
compiler/interpreter, and a simple
collaboration tool. It's a pastebin that
executes code for you. You paste your code, and codepad runs it
and
gives you a short URL you can use to share it." For example,
through something written here a few days ago, I came across a
fascinating generator of rational approximations to pi written
in Haskell, and the author used
codepad.org
to show both the code and the results. The code is at
http://codepad.org/C2IVTlCC
and the explanation is at
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-best-rational-approximation-of-pi-Let-best-be-the-difference-between-the-number-of-digits-used-to-represent-the-rational-and-the-number-of-accurate-digits-in-the-decimal-expansion/answer/Anders-Kaseorg
Understandably, the implementation of
codepad.org is careful about
setting resource limits, so it would be interesting to see how
well it handles your shell and C programs, both of which are
effectively fork-bombs.