On Fri, 18 Nov 2011 06:58:41 +0100, Evan Laforge
Any ideas for further improvements?
I feel like there should be a canonical "what is WHNF" page on haskell.org that docs like this can link to. Namely, what it is theoretically, what that means for various examples of thunks (i.e. show how a sample graph would get reduced), and what that means for programs (e.g. this builds up thunks, this doesn't).
All this info is certainly available, but it seems to not be as easy as it should be to find, e.g. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Lazy_vs._non-strict says "described WHNF..." and, well, http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Haskell/Laziness#Thunks_and_Weak_head_normal_fo... is pretty good actually. Maybe the haskellwiki page should just link to that.
I created a page with the title "Weak head normal form"[0] and a redirect from WHNF to this page. Regards, Henk-Jan van Tuyl [0] http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Weak_head_normal_form -- http://Van.Tuyl.eu/ http://members.chello.nl/hjgtuyl/tourdemonad.html --