Re: [Haskell-cafe] Re: Haskell vs OCaml

On Wed, 4 May 2005 03:02:58 -0400 ajb@spamcop.net wrote:

Quoting Erik de Castro Lopo :

...

Yes, but only if your functions are impure.

Wrong. An unevaluated thunk can, in general, be much larger than what the thunk evaluates to. (Think of "length" of a large list, for example.) If such a thunk is unevaluated but not garbage for a considerable time, then you have a space leak.

So you do need to think about evaluation order. One good rule of thumb is: On large data structures, try to have a single consumer only.

Ahh, OK. Thats a significantly non-trivial detail to have to think about :-). Erik -- +-----------------------------------------------------------+ Erik de Castro Lopo nospam@mega-nerd.com (Yes it's valid) +-----------------------------------------------------------+ "It's far too easy to make fun of Microsoft products, but it takes a real man to make them work, and a god to make them do anything useful" -- Anonymous