As others have pointed out, _in principle_, foldr is not at all
deficient. We can, for example, express foldl via foldr. Moreover, we
can express head, tail, take, drop and even zipWith through
foldr. That is, the entire list processing library can be written in
terms of foldr:
http://okmij.org/ftp/Algorithms.html#zip-folds
That said, to express foldl via foldr, we need a higher-order
fold. There are various problems with higher-order folds, related to
the cost of building closures. The problems are especially severe
in strict languages or strict contexts. Indeed,
foldl_via_foldr f z l = foldr (\e a z -> a (f z e)) id l z
first constructs the closure and then applies it to z. The closure has
the same structure as the list -- it is isomorphic to the
list. However, the closure representation of a list takes typically
quite more space than the list. So, in strict languages, expressing
foldl via foldr is a really bad idea. It won't work for big lists.
BTW, this is why foldM is _left_ fold.
The arguments against higher-order folds as a `big hammer' were made
back in 1998 by Gibbons and Jones
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.42.1735
So, the left-fold with the early termination has a good
justification. In fact, this is how Iteratees were first presented, at
the DEFUN08 tutorial (part of the ICFP2008 conference). The idea of
left fold with early termination is much older though. For example, Takusen
(a database access framework) has been using it since 2003 or so. For
a bit of history, see
http://okmij.org/ftp/Streams.html#fold-stream
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