[Haskell] A few newbie questions about tracing/debugging and order of execution

[Robert Dockins]

On Dec 28, 2005, at 6:10 AM, Hunter Kelly wrote:

> Heya, I decided to play around with Haskell and see what it's like.
> I used a small problem to explore it.  Basically, given two words,
> find the least number of 1 letter changes that will go from one
> word to the other (e.g.  for "fig" and "dog" either fig -> fog ->  
> dog  or
> fig -> dig -> dog).
>
> I came up with a solution, but I have to say it was quite difficult to
> get any debugging information, and when I did, the result was fairly
> surprising!


I see you are using Debug.Trace to generate your debug messages.  The  
'trace' function is a sort of strange one, because it breaks the  
usual rules that Haskell follows; it allows you to generate output in  
the middle of a pure computation.  It works by generating output  
_when it is evaluated_.  However, without the IO monad to make  
everything sequenced and well-behaved, it can be difficult to predict  
when that will occur.  In the particular program you posted, the  
'trace' thunk is not evaluated until after the recursive call has  
completed, which gives the reversed output.  Furthermore, when there  
is no solution, the 'trace' thunk isn't evaluated at all (the magic  
of laziness!), so you never see that output.

To make your traces show up where you expect, you need to make sure  
that your trace function gets forced earlier and on both success and  
failure paths.  Since your function is written as a big let...in  
if ...  block you can do something like this:

   ..... =
     let ...
          ....
     in trace traceString
          (if ...
              then
              else
           )

That way, the trace will be output before the 'if' is evaluated, so  
you will get output for both branches.  I can't tell from a quick  
inspection if it will return the results in the order you expect, but  
I think it may.



Rob Dockins

Speak softly and drive a Sherman tank.
Laugh hard; it's a long way to the bank.
           -- TMBG