silly questions about 'seq'

I have some questions about the implementation of haskell... what does it mean to apply 'seq' to a function? how does one place an abstraction in WHNF? it seems that the ONLY thing one can do to a function is apply it to some argument so does seq need to apply the function to a dummy argument or something? similarly, how does seq work on polymorphic types? without knowing what the unboxed representation is for a type, it seems tricky to know how to place it in WHNF... John -- --------------------------------------------------------------------------- John Meacham - California Institute of Technology, Alum. - john@foo.net ---------------------------------------------------------------------------