On 9/4/08, John Dorsey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I'm no master either, but I'd argue that if we promise new programmers > that they don't need to care about strictness, we thereby ensure that > default laziness is treacherous. > > A year or two ago, ISTR that *most* of the newbie-generated traffic in > the cafe was about atrocious performance of naive programs due to > strict/lazy concerns. I think it was scaring people away. >
I think it's debatable what the various causality relationships might be here. > Adding strictness can improve asymptotic space performance, as an example. > Is there a reason to think this won't always be true? Honest question, > since I don't know nearly enough about strictness analysis to guess > how good it'll be some day. Adding strictness can also worsen asymptotic space (and time) performance. That's one reason why we use a lazy language at all. Strictness analysis is an approximation to the problem of determining what parts of a program can be evaluated strictly without changing their meaning, because if we had a perfect solution to that problem, we could solve the halting problem. Cheers, Tim -- Tim Chevalier * http://cs.pdx.edu/~tjc * Often in error, never in doubt "There are no difficult problems, just unfortunate notations." -- Alfonso Gracia-Saz _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
