Joachim Durchholz wrote:
Trying to fully evaluate an infinite data structure will result in looping or memory exhaustion, and you have that possibilities in almost all languages.
Yes, but I suspect that Haskell makes it easier to make that kind of bug. Worse, it's easy to introduce this kind of bug: just pass a list returned from function a to function b, not being aware that a may return an infinite list and that b may do something with it that requires that it's evaluated. In other words, this kind of bug can come into existence during code integration... and the type system doesn't warn you when you do it.
If you're worrying about some unexpected input causing a function never to terminate, don't you also have to worry about some unexpected input causing a function to become so glacially slow that from the user's perspective, it *might as well* never terminate?