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

jeffmcompsci
Title: Design and Build Great Web APIs - typo “https://company-atk.herokuapp.com/2258ie4t68jv” (page 19, third bullet in URL list) Typo:...
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
HarryDeveloper
Hi @venkats, It has been mentioned in the description of ‘Supervisory Job’ title that 2 things as mentioned below result in the same eff...
New
AleksandrKudashkin
On the page xv there is an instruction to run bin/setup from the main folder. I downloaded the source code today (12/03/21) and can’t see...
New
New
leonW
I ran this command after installing the sample application: $ cards add do something --owner Brian And got a file not found error: Fil...
New
nicoatridge
Hi, I have just acquired Michael Fazio’s “Kotlin and Android Development” to learn about game programming for Android. I have a game in p...
New
Charles
In general, the book isn’t yet updated for Phoenix version 1.6. On page 18 of the book, the authors indicate that an auto generated of ro...
New
akraut
The markup used to display the uploaded image results in a Phoenix.LiveView.HTMLTokenizer.ParseError error. lib/pento_web/live/product_l...
New
taguniversalmachine
It seems the second code snippet is missing the code to set the current_user: current_user: Accounts.get_user_by_session_token(session["...
New

Other popular topics Top

New
PragmaticBookshelf
Brace yourself for a fun challenge: build a photorealistic 3D renderer from scratch! In just a couple of weeks, build a ray tracer that r...
New
New
AstonJ
I’ve been hearing quite a lot of comments relating to the sound of a keyboard, with one of the most desirable of these called ‘thock’, he...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Rust is an exciting new programming language combining the power of C with memory safety, fearless concurrency, and productivity boosters...
New
AstonJ
Biggest jackpot ever apparently! :upside_down_face: I don’t (usually) gamble/play the lottery, but working on a program to predict the...
New
Maartz
Hi folks, I don’t know if I saw this here but, here’s a new programming language, called Roc Reminds me a bit of Elm and thus Haskell. ...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Author Spotlight Rebecca Skinner @RebeccaSkinner Welcome to our latest author spotlight, where we sit down with Rebecca Skinner, auth...
New
AnfaengerAlex
Hello, I’m a beginner in Android development and I’m facing an issue with my project setup. In my build.gradle.kts file, I have the foll...
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: