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Today's Topics:
1. Understanding Haskell fcn calls ([email protected])
2. Re: Understanding Haskell fcn calls (Daniel Fischer)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Message: 1
Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2011 14:49:51 -0800
From: <[email protected]>
Subject: [Haskell-beginners] Understanding Haskell fcn calls
To: <[email protected]>
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed
When I learn a new language, I like to look at the assembly code for
some simple fcn calls. I tried GHC -S on the following program:
add' x y = x + y
main = do
print $ add' 1 2
The result of ghc -S add.hs was 301 lines of assembly code. Adding
an explicit type annotation for add' brought it down to 252 lines, and
the code was still beyond my meager ability to take in assembly.
Is there a good reference that gives a simple explanation of how
Haskell function calls work? This seems crucial to understanding how
to efficiently use the language, given what I've read about tail call
optimization.
thanks
Lee Short
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Message: 2
Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2011 01:09:57 +0100
From: Daniel Fischer <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [Haskell-beginners] Understanding Haskell fcn calls
To: [email protected]
Cc: [email protected]
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
On Wednesday 16 February 2011 23:49:51, [email protected] wrote:
> Is there a good reference that gives a simple explanation of how
> Haskell function calls work?
I don't know one.
> This seems crucial to understanding how
> to efficiently use the language,
No, fortunately it's not necessary. To use the language efficiently, you
must understand (not necessarily completely, though) laziness, where that's
a Good Thing? and where bad.
> given what I've read about tail call optimization.
Which is far less important in Haskell than in strict languages.
Due to laziness, a recursive (but not tail-recursive) function can deliver
partial results before entering a recursive call, which often is better
than tail-recursion.
Consider
map :: (a -> b) -> [a] -> [b]
map f (x:xs) = f x : map f xs
map _ [] = []
When you call map f on a nonempty list (x:xs), you immediately get the
result, a cons cell with two children, one is the thunk (how to calculate f
x), the other is the thunk (how to calculate map f xs).
Thus, when you consume the result sequentially, the computation can run in
constant space, each list element can be garbage collected as soon as it is
consumed, before the next element comes alive (of course, ordinarily the
garbage collector will not run that frequently, so there'll be a handful of
values lingering after being consumed).
With a tail-recursive function, the entire result has to be in memory at
once, since it can only be returned after the computation is complete.
Tail-recursion is however good if no partial results are possible, as for
the sum of a list of Ints (but then you need to make sure that the
accumulator is sufficiently evaluated or you'll just create a huge thunk
which eats your stack when it is finally evaluated).
As a rule of thumb, tail-recursion is for strict stuff, not for lazy
things. There are lots of lazy things in Haskell, so tail-recursion plays a
comparatively small role.
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