joseds

joseds

Effective Haskell: B6.0, Chapter 2, p.83: Suggestion: Distinguish thunks by name

Hi, I got a bit sidetracked, but I now have time to continue with your book, which I am enjoying a lot. You explain the co-recursion in chapter 2 really well and I think that showing how the (lazy) evaluation works step-by-step is very helpful and corrected a wrong idea I had about how foldr operates, thanks!

I have just one recommendation regarding naming:

I think that all is very well explained, but some of the readers may get confused that all thunks are named <thunk> when in case of the Fibonacci numbers, in each step one is the tail of the other. So, to use different names for different things, maybe something like <thunk_n> and <thunk_n+1> could be helpful. Maybe it would even be enough to distinguish them “locally” as <thunk0> and <thunk1>.

Marked As Solved

RebeccaSkinner

RebeccaSkinner

Author of Effective Haskell

I’m glad you are enjoying the book! I see what you mean about the <thunk> references. My initial goal was to use a name that made it clear that we don’t know too much about what’s inside of the thunk, merely that it is some arbitrary thunk. I might try both your suggestion of adding clearly names, as well as an aside to explain that we don’t care too much about the details of the thunks, and see which one ends up seeming to be more clear when I try both approaches. I really appreciate the note!

Where Next?

Popular Pragmatic Bookshelf topics Top

belgoros
Following the steps described in Chapter 6 of the book, I’m stuck with running the migration as described on page 84: bundle exec sequel...
New
jeffmcompsci
Title: Design and Build Great Web APIs - typo “https://company-atk.herokuapp.com/2258ie4t68jv” (page 19, third bullet in URL list) Typo:...
New
yulkin
your book suggests to use Image.toByteData() to convert image to bytes, however I get the following error: "the getter ‘toByteData’ isn’t...
New
raul
Hi Travis! Thank you for the cool book! :slight_smile: I made a list of issues and thought I could post them chapter by chapter. I’m rev...
New
gilesdotcodes
In case this helps anyone, I’ve had issues setting up the rails source code. Here were the solutions: In Gemfile, change gem 'rails' t...
New
jskubick
I think I might have found a problem involving SwitchCompat, thumbTint, and trackTint. As entered, the SwitchCompat changes color to hol...
New
jgchristopher
“The ProductLive.Index template calls a helper function, live_component/3, that in turn calls on the modal component. ” Excerpt From: Br...
New
jskubick
I’m under the impression that when the reader gets to page 136 (“View Data with the Database Inspector”), the code SHOULD be able to buil...
New
adamwoolhether
Is there any place where we can discuss the solutions to some of the exercises? I can figure most of them out, but am having trouble with...
New
tkhobbes
After some hassle, I was able to finally run bin/setup, now I have started the rails server but I get this error message right when I vis...
New

Other popular topics Top

Devtalk
Hello Devtalk World! Please let us know a little about who you are and where you’re from :nerd_face:
New
Exadra37
Please tell us what is your preferred monitor setup for programming(not gaming) and why you have chosen it. Does your monitor have eye p...
New
brentjanderson
Bought the Moonlander mechanical keyboard. Cherry Brown MX switches. Arms and wrists have been hurting enough that it’s time I did someth...
New
AstonJ
Saw this on TikTok of all places! :lol: Anyone heard of them before? Lite:
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Author Spotlight Rebecca Skinner @RebeccaSkinner Welcome to our latest author spotlight, where we sit down with Rebecca Skinner, auth...
New
hilfordjames
There appears to have been an update that has changed the terminology for what has previously been known as the Taskbar Overflow - this h...
New
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Develop, deploy, and debug BEAM applications using BEAMOps: a new paradigm that focuses on scalability, fault tolerance, and owning each ...
New
Margaret
Ask Me Anything with Mark Volkmann @mvolkmann On February 24 and 25, we are giving you a chance to ask questions of PragProg author M...
New
mindriot
Ok, well here are some thoughts and opinions on some of the ergonomic keyboards I have, I guess like mini review of each that I use enoug...
New

Sub Categories: