[Haskell-cafe] Re: Re: Re: implementing recursive let

[Ben Franksen]

Ryan Ingram wrote:
> The problem is that ErrorT makes any argument to mdo *much* more
> strict, and therefore much more likely to loop.
> 
> This is because each action needs to know whether the previous action
> was successful before it can continue.

Thanks, you are confirming what I suspected. I just wasn't sure that I
didn't do something stupid that could easily be fixed.

> Notice that when you got it to work, you *always* return "Right v";
> that is, you never actually have an error.

Yes, exactly. It helps in the simplest cases, but with function definitions
even this is not enough.

> If you want to avoid introducing bottoms into your code, I would avoid
> using fix/mdo except in cases where you can prove that the code is
> non-strict.  You keep running into cases where your code is more
> strict than you would like which is introducing the bottoms.
> 
> To understand this better, consider the following function:
> 
> fixEither :: (a -> Either e a) -> Either e a
> fixEither f = x where
>     x = f a
>     (Right a) = x
> 
> Here, f *cannot* attempt to do anything with its argument until it is
> absolutely known that f is returning a "Right" value.

Interesting. I'll have to think about this one.

> Perhaps there is a different way to write this interpreter that avoids
> needing to tie the knot so tightly?  Can you split recursive-let into
> two stages, one where you construct the environment with dummy
> variables and a second where you populate them with the results of
> their evaluations?  You might need some sort of mutable thunk that you
> can store in the environment, which makes sense to me; in GHC Core,
> "let" means "allocate a thunk on the heap".

Yea, this is how I would do it in an imperative language. I thought I could
avoid mtuable cells by exploiting lazyness. I am not yet ready to give up,
however. One thing I want to try is whether I can come up with a variation
of ErrorT that is less strict. Another idea I just had is that maybe
continuations might help, as they provide a possibility to 'jump' out of a
calculation.

Chers
Ben