With the expression: words (repeat 'a')

Using WinHugs Sep 06 I get a stack overflow.

Using Hugs Linux May 06 I get a GC fails to reclaim sufficient space error

Using GHC and Yhc both of these succeed.

I have a similar issue in one of my functions which is showing the same behaviour.

assuming you've got a terminating application in mind,-) a slightly more interesting expression is: test span = span (/=' ') $ replicate 100000 'a' ++ [' '] without optimizations, hugs is prone to fail for such deep applications of non-tail-recursive functions like span/break, splitAt, .. try this variation: span p l = span' p l id where span' p [] = \c->c ([],[]) span' p xs@(x:xs') | p x = span' p xs' . (\c (a,b)->c (x:a,b)) | otherwise = \c->c ([],xs) claus