sedillard:
Hi,
I found myself wanting a lazy version of Data.Map today, and by "lazy" I mean in the node-subtree pointers. I trust the library writers when they put strictness annotations in the fields of the tree nodes, so I'm wondering what the various implications of lazy subtrees are, beyond the obvious speed hit. Does this cause space leaks beyond what lazy value pointers can already cause? Can someone point me to some reading that discusses this?
Anyway, I'm positing to libraries (rather than haskell-cafe) to gauge opinion about a possible rewrite of Data.Map and IntMap to remove strictness annotations (bangs) from the node constructors and move them into the functions (as seqs). "Rewrite" is maybe too strong of a word. "Significant patch" is more like it. It would involve only those functions that construct Bin values directly, which is not that many. Less than a days work, I think (yes that means I volunteer.) Semantics of everything remains unchanged, but it opens up the possibility for lazy versions of some functions.
How about doing it as a separate library, then we can choose either strict or lazy as the case may be? -- Don