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

abtin
page 20: … protoc command… I had to additionally run the following go get commands in order to be able to compile protobuf code using go...
New
iPaul
page 37 ANTLRInputStream input = new ANTLRInputStream(is); as of ANTLR 4 .8 should be: CharStream stream = CharStreams.fromStream(i...
New
johnp
Running the examples in chapter 5 c under pytest 5.4.1 causes an AttributeError: ‘module’ object has no attribute ‘config’. In particula...
New
simonpeter
When I try the command to create a pair of migration files I get an error. user=&gt; (create-migration "guestbook") Execution error (Ill...
New
herminiotorres
Hi @Margaret , On page VII the book tells us the example and snippets will be all using Elixir version 1.11 But on page 3 almost the en...
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
adamwoolhether
I’m not quite sure what’s going on here, but I’m unable to have to containers successfully complete the Readiness/Liveness checks. I’m im...
New
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

PragmaticBookshelf
Take your Go skills to the next level by learning how to design, develop, and deploy a distributed service. Start from the bare essential...
New
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
ohm
Which, if any, games do you play? On what platform? I just bought (and completed) Minecraft Dungeons for my Nintendo Switch. Other than ...
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
poll poll Be sure to check out @Dusty’s article posted here: An Introduction to Alternative Keyboard Layouts It’s one of the best write-...
New
AstonJ
Just done a fresh install of macOS Big Sur and on installing Erlang I am getting: asdf install erlang 23.1.2 Configure failed. checking ...
New
AstonJ
Continuing the discussion from Thinking about learning Crystal, let’s discuss - I was wondering which languages don’t GC - maybe we can c...
New
Margaret
Hello everyone! This thread is to tell you about what authors from The Pragmatic Bookshelf are writing on Medium.
1147 29994 760
New
Help
I am trying to crate a game for the Nintendo switch, I wanted to use Java as I am comfortable with that programming language. Can you use...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Author Spotlight Rebecca Skinner @RebeccaSkinner Welcome to our latest author spotlight, where we sit down with Rebecca Skinner, auth...
New

Sub Categories: