On Wednesday 16 March 2011 22:03:51, Yves Parès wrote:
Can a type signature give you a hint about whether a function evaluates some/all of its arguments (i.e. is strict/partially strict/lazy), or do you have to look at the implementation to know?
Cheating, with GHC, a magic hash tells you it's strict ( foo :: Int# -> Double# -> Double ). But generally, a type signature can give at most a hint, because the implementation could always be foo _ = undefined -- [], Nothing, 0, whatever the result type supports and hints for laziness tend to be stronger than hints for strictness ( const :: a -> b -> a hints strongly that it's lazy in the second argument, but it could still be strict; arguments of type Int, Double or the like have a better than average chance of being strict). The only way to know is looking at the implementation, but if the docs say something about strictness, that should be good enough unless you have reason to suspect they're wrong.