Re: Strict Haskell debate

Andy Gill wrote:

I'd like to see a way of enforcing return strictness, that is where you have confidence that what a function is returning is fully evaluated.

Imagine a function hstrict;

hstrict :: a -> a

Is this like deepseq, that strictly evaluates internal structure using seq?

With hstrict you can write functions in the style.

fun f a b c = hstrict $ .... where ... ...

But surely fun can return the unevaluated thunk (hstrict x)? Since hstrict has not yet been called, it can't do its strictifying magic, whatever that is. -- Ashley Yakeley