OCaml 4.03: Everything else

Re:OCaml 4.03: Everything else by Tehnix on Wednesday March 02, 2016 @09:50AM (#11210202)

You can somewhat switch Haskell to being strict-by-default with the new Strict/StrictData pragma[0], which should be in GHC 8.0. There's also a great write-up of it here [1].

As someone else mentioned, Backpack is trying to "fix" the module system in Haskell[2], which should be interesting. That said, I don't have much of a problem with it, but then again I haven't seen the light of the OCaml way yet :)

[0] https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/StrictPragma

[1] http://blog.johantibell.com/2015/11/the-design-of-strict-has...

[2] http://plv.mpi-sws.org/backpack/

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Re:OCaml 4.03: Everything else by catnaroek on Wednesday March 02, 2016 @09:55AM (#11210249)

The real benefit of using a strict-by-default language is that laziness shows up in types. That is, I can check the type of a variable, and tell whether it's guaranteed to be a value (if it has type `Foo`), or it's a potentially still unforced thunk (if it has type `Lazy Foo`). For instance, the real type of lazy lists would be:

    data Front a = Nil | Cons a (Stream a)
    type Stream a = Lazy (Front a)

Haskell doesn't do this, not even with the Strict or StrictData pragmas.

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