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

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
sdmoralesma
Title: Web Development with Clojure, Third Edition - migrations/create not working: p159 When I execute the command: user=&gt; (create-...
New
mikecargal
Title: Hands-on Rust: question about get_component (page 295) (feel free to respond. “You dug you’re own hole… good luck”) I have somet...
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
Chrichton
Dear Sophie. I tried to do the “Authorization” exercise and have two questions: When trying to plug in an email-service, I found the ...
New
brian-m-ops
#book-python-testing-with-pytest-second-edition Hi. Thanks for writing the book. I am just learning so this might just of been an issue ...
New
brunogirin
When running tox for the first time, I got the following error: ERROR: InterpreterNotFound: python3.10 I realised that I was running ...
New
gorkaio
root_layout: {PentoWeb.LayoutView, :root}, This results in the following following error: no “root” html template defined for PentoWeb...
New
mcpierce
@mfazio23 I’ve applied the changes from Chapter 5 of the book and everything builds correctly and runs. But, when I try to start a game,...
New
dachristenson
I’ve got to the end of Ch. 11, and the app runs, with all tabs displaying what they should – at first. After switching around between St...
New

Other popular topics Top

Exadra37
I am thinking in building or buy a desktop computer for programing, both professionally and on my free time, and my choice of OS is Linux...
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
This looks like a stunning keycap set :orange_heart: A LEGENDARY KEYBOARD LIVES ON When you bought an Apple Macintosh computer in the e...
New
Margaret
Hello everyone! This thread is to tell you about what authors from The Pragmatic Bookshelf are writing on Medium.
1147 28379 760
New
rustkas
Intensively researching Erlang books and additional resources on it, I have found that the topic of using Regular Expressions is either c...
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: Peter Ullrich @PJUllrich Data is at the core of every business, but it is useless if nobody can access and analyze ...
New
First poster: bot
zig/http.zig at 7cf2cbb33ef34c1d211135f56d30fe23b6cacd42 · ziglang/zig. General-purpose programming language and toolchain for maintaini...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Fight complexity and reclaim the original spirit of agility by learning to simplify how you develop software. The result: a more humane a...
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: