Tom Ellis wrote:
To avoid retaining a large lazy data structure in memory it is useful to hide it behind a function call. Below, "many" is used twice. It is hidden behind a function call so it can be garbage collected between uses.
As you discovered, it is quite challenging to ``go against the grain'' and force recomputation. GHC is quite good at avoiding recomputation. This is a trade-off, of time vs space. For large search tree, it is space that is a premium, and laziness and similar strategies are exactly the wrong trade-off. The solution (which I've seen in some of the internal library code) is to confuse GHC with extra functions: http://okmij.org/ftp/Haskell/misc.html#memo-off So, eventually it is possible to force recomputation. But the solution leaves a poor taste -- fighting a compiler is never a good idea. So, this is a bug of sort -- not the bug of GHC, but of lazy evaluation. Lazy evaluation is not the best evaluation strategy. It is a trade-off, which suits a large class of problems and punishes another large class of problems.