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

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
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
New
oaklandgit
Hi, I completed chapter 6 but am getting the following error when running: thread 'main' panicked at 'Failed to load texture: IoError(O...
New
hazardco
On page 78 the following code appears: &lt;%= link_to ‘Destroy’, product, class: ‘hover:underline’, method: :delete, data: { confirm...
New
jonmac
The allprojects block listed on page 245 produces the following error when syncing gradle: “org.gradle.api.GradleScriptException: A prob...
New
s2k
Hi all, currently I wonder how the Tailwind colours work (or don’t work). For example, in app/views/layouts/application.html.erb I have...
New
kolossal
Hi, I need some help, I’m new to rust and was learning through your book. but I got stuck at the last stage of distribution. Whenever I t...
New
ggerico
I got this error when executing the plot files on macOS Ventura 13.0.1 with Python 3.10.8 and matplotlib 3.6.1: programming_ML/code/03_...
New

Other popular topics Top

AstonJ
What chair do you have while working… and why? Is there a ‘best’ type of chair or working position for developers?
New
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
PragmaticBookshelf
Build highly interactive applications without ever leaving Elixir, the way the experts do. Let LiveView take care of performance, scalabi...
New
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
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
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
AstonJ
This is a very quick guide, you just need to: Download LM Studio: https://lmstudio.ai/ Click on search Type DeepSeek, then select the o...
New

Sub Categories: