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

edruder
I thought that there might be interest in using the book with Rails 6.1 and Ruby 2.7.2. I’ll note what I needed to do differently here. ...
New
jdufour
Hello! On page xix of the preface, it says there is a community forum "… for help if your’re stuck on one of the exercises in this book… ...
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
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
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
rainforest
Hi, I’ve got a question about the implementation of PubSub when using a Phoenix.Socket.Transport behaviour rather than channels. Before ...
New
EdBorn
Title: Agile Web Development with Rails 7: (page 70) I am running windows 11 pro with rails 7.0.3 and ruby 3.1.2p20 (2022-04-12 revision...
New
Keton
When running the program in chapter 8, “Implementing Combat”, the printout Health before attack was never printed so I assumed something ...
New
a.zampa
@mfazio23 I’m following the indications of the book and arriver ad chapter 10, but the app cannot be compiled due to an error in the Bas...
New
davetron5000
Hello faithful readers! If you have tried to follow along in the book, you are asked to start up the dev environment via dx/build and ar...
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
Write Elixir tests that you can be proud of. Dive into Elixir’s test philosophy and gain mastery over the terminology and concepts that u...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Rust is an exciting new programming language combining the power of C with memory safety, fearless concurrency, and productivity boosters...
New
foxtrottwist
A few weeks ago I started using Warp a terminal written in rust. Though in it’s current state of development there are a few caveats (tab...
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
First poster: AstonJ
Jan | Rethink the Computer. Jan turns your computer into an AI machine by running LLMs locally on your computer. It’s a privacy-focus, l...
New
AstonJ
If you’re getting errors like this: psql: error: connection to server on socket “/tmp/.s.PGSQL.5432” failed: No such file or directory ...
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
AstonJ
This is cool! DEEPSEEK-V3 ON M4 MAC: BLAZING FAST INFERENCE ON APPLE SILICON We just witnessed something incredible: the largest open-s...
New

Sub Categories: