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

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
joepstender
The generated iex result below should list products instead of product for the metadata. (page 67) iex&gt; product = %Product{} %Pento....
New
alanq
This isn’t directly about the book contents so maybe not the right forum…but in some of the code apps (e.g. turbo/06) it sends a TURBO_ST...
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
curtosis
Running mix deps.get in the sensor_hub directory fails with the following error: ** (Mix) No SSH public keys found in ~/.ssh. An ssh aut...
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
hgkjshegfskef
The test is as follows: Scenario: Intersecting a scaled sphere with a ray Given r ← ray(point(0, 0, -5), vector(0, 0, 1)) And s ← sphere...
New
digitalbias
Title: Build a Weather Station with Elixir and Nerves: Problem connecting to Postgres with Grafana on (page 64) If you follow the defau...
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
creminology
Skimming ahead, much of the following is explained in Chapter 3, but new readers (like me!) will hit a roadblock in Chapter 2 with their ...
New

Other popular topics Top

AstonJ
If it’s a mechanical keyboard, which switches do you have? Would you recommend it? Why? What will your next keyboard be? Pics always w...
New
DevotionGeo
I know that -t flag is used along with -i flag for getting an interactive shell. But I cannot digest what the man page for docker run com...
New
AstonJ
You might be thinking we should just ask who’s not using VSCode :joy: however there are some new additions in the space that might give V...
New
AstonJ
Do the test and post your score :nerd_face: :keyboard: If possible, please add info such as the keyboard you’re using, the layout (Qw...
New
Exadra37
I am asking for any distro that only has the bare-bones to be able to get a shell in the server and then just install the packages as we ...
New
AstonJ
In case anyone else is wondering why Ruby 3 doesn’t show when you do asdf list-all ruby :man_facepalming: do this first: asdf plugin-upd...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Author Spotlight Mike Riley @mriley This month, we turn the spotlight on Mike Riley, author of Portable Python Projects. Mike’s book ...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Author Spotlight: VM Brasseur @vmbrasseur We have a treat for you today! We turn the spotlight onto Open Source as we sit down with V...
New
DevotionGeo
I have always used antique keyboards like Cherry MX 1800 or Cherry MX 8100 and almost always have modified the switches in some way, like...
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: