Felipe Lessa wrote:

As as side note, GHC's flag -Wall would have warned about creating a variable with a name already in scope.

*makes a mental note* I've created bugs like this far too many times...

AAh! Thanks a ton! Hemanth K On Jan 7, 2008 12:10 AM, Rodrigo Queiro wrote:

You have used the name 'pos' twice, for both the parameter and the returned value of the recursive call. The reason this results in an infinite loop is that in code like

let x = x + 1

Haskell treats both xs to be references to the same thing, so evaluates: x = x + 1 = (x + 1) + 1 = ((x + 1) + 1) + 1 ...

which results in the infinite loop.

...

Hi,

I am new to functional and lazy programming languages ( that's correct, my life has been pretty pathetic so far) and am not able to understand GHC's behaviour for a particular function. Can someone help me please?

I am trying to write a function which would compare two strings (from reverse) and return the position of first mismatch. This is part of the right-to-left scan of bayer-moore algorithm.. and it is essential for me to do it from reverse. Since my goal is to learn haskell, I am not using Data.ByteString.

My function is as follows:

matchReverse :: String -> String ->Int->(Bool,Int) matchReverse [] [] pos = (True,pos) matchReverse _ [] pos = (False,pos) matchReverse [] _ pos = (False,pos) matchReverse (x:xs) (y:ys) pos = let (matched,pos) = matchReverse xs ys (pos +1) in if matched then ((x==y),pos) else (False,pos)

The behaviour I expected in four scenarios is as below: 1.matchReverse "kapilash" "kapilash" 0 --should return (True,0) 2.matchReverse "kapilash" "kapilast" 0 --should return (False,8) 3.matchReverse str1 str2 0 --should return (False,0) 4.matchReverse str1 str1 0 --should return (True,0)

where str1 and str2 are defined as below: str1 = replicate 1000 'a' str2 = 'b':(replicate 999 'a')

what confounds me is that it is able to identify the first element of

...

tuple in ALL the cases. Invoking fst on the each of the four calls instantly returns the expected value.(even for the cases 3 and 4 where, there are thousand elements) But it seems to go into an infinite loop while calculating the 'snd' of

On 06/01/2008, Sai Hemanth K wrote: the the

...

tuple. Even for strings containing just one element each. can someone throw some light on this please? Why does it go into an infinite loop?

Many thanks Kapilash

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