On 02 November 2005 17:06, Scherrer, Chad wrote:

...

Surely not... sum is defined by Haskell 98 as:

sum = foldl (+) 0

and this is exactly what GHC provides. Furthermore we have specialised strict versions for Int and Integer.

I'd been using ghci for testing along the way and getting terrible results; does the specialization only apply to ghc per se?

Yes, you need 'ghc -O' to get the optimised versions. The performance characteristics of unoptimised (including interpreted) code are often quite different. You can load the optimised module into GHCi, of course. Cheers, Simon