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

iPaul
page 37 ANTLRInputStream input = new ANTLRInputStream(is); as of ANTLR 4 .8 should be: CharStream stream = CharStreams.fromStream(i...
New
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
brianokken
Many tasks_proj/tests directories exist in chapters 2, 3, 5 that have tests that use the custom markers smoke and get, which are not decl...
New
ianwillie
Hello Brian, I have some problems with running the code in your book. I like the style of the book very much and I have learnt a lot as...
New
jesse050717
Title: Web Development with Clojure, Third Edition, pg 116 Hi - I just started chapter 5 and I am stuck on page 116 while trying to star...
New
JohnS
I can’t setup the Rails source code. This happens in a working directory containing multiple (postgres) Rails apps. With: ruby-3.0.0 s...
New
raul
Page 28: It implements io.ReaderAt on the store type. Sorry if it’s a dumb question but was the io.ReaderAt supposed to be io.ReadAt? ...
New
cro
I am working on the “Your Turn” for chapter one and building out the restart button talked about on page 27. It recommends looking into ...
New
hazardco
On page 78 the following code appears: &lt;%= link_to ‘Destroy’, product, class: ‘hover:underline’, method: :delete, data: { confirm...
New
jwandekoken
Book: Programming Phoenix LiveView, page 142 (157/378), file lib/pento_web/live/product_live/form_component.ex, in the function below: d...
New

Other popular topics Top

PragmaticBookshelf
Ruby, Io, Prolog, Scala, Erlang, Clojure, Haskell. With Seven Languages in Seven Weeks, by Bruce A. Tate, you’ll go beyond the syntax—and...
New
Rainer
My first contact with Erlang was about 2 years ago when I used RabbitMQ, which is written in Erlang, for my job. This made me curious and...
New
AstonJ
There’s a whole world of custom keycaps out there that I didn’t know existed! Check out all of our Keycaps threads here: https://forum....
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Build highly interactive applications without ever leaving Elixir, the way the experts do. Let LiveView take care of performance, scalabi...
New
mafinar
This is going to be a long an frequently posted thread. While talking to a friend of mine who has taken data structure and algorithm cou...
New
New
husaindevelop
Inside our android webview app, we are trying to paste the copied content from another app eg (notes) using navigator.clipboard.readtext ...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Programming Ruby is the most complete book on Ruby, covering both the language itself and the standard library as well as commonly used t...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Author Spotlight: Peter Ullrich @PJUllrich Data is at the core of every business, but it is useless if nobody can access and analyze ...
New
RobertRichards
Hair Salon Games for Girls Fun Girls Hair Saloon game is mainly developed for kids. This game allows users to select virtual avatars to ...
New

Sub Categories: