First of all, thanks to the people who responded :) On Sat, Aug 14, 2010 at 17:49, Christopher Lane Hinson < lane@downstairspeople.org> wrote:
On Sat, 14 Aug 2010, Tako Schotanus wrote:
I was reading this article:
http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2009/11/writing_basic_functions_in_has.php
And came to the part where it shows:
fiblist = 0 : 1 : (zipWith (+) fiblist (tail fiblist))
But then I read that "Once it's been referenced, then the list up to where you looked is concrete - the computations won't be repeated."
It is so implemented. If you *really* wanted a weak reference that could be garbage collected and rebuilt (you don't), it could be made to happen.
I understand, if you don't want to keep the memory tied up you either define the reference locally or you use another algorithm.
and I started wondering how that works.
Because this seems to mean that functions could have unknown (to the caller) memory requirements.
This is true in any programming language or runtime. Nothing special has happened: you could implement the same thing in C/C++/Java/Python, but it would take 10-100 lines of code.
Sure, although the memory use would normally be more obvious and it would actually be more work to make the result globally permanent. (the difference between the 10 lines and the 100 lines you refer to probably)
How does one, programming in Haskell, keep that in check?
And when does that memory get reclaimed?
Haskell is garbage collected, as soon as the fiblist is not longer reachable, and the runtime wants to reclaim the memory, it will.
If fiblist is a top-level declaration it will always be reachable.
Ok, makes sense. Just to make this clear, I'm not complaining nor suggesting there is anything wrong with the way Haskell does things (minds immeasurably superior to mine working on this stuff, I'm not going to pretend to know better), it's just one of those "surprises" for somebody who has no experience yet with Haskell. Thanks, -Tako