It's useful for: debug :: Show a => a -> a debug x = unsafePerformIO (hPutStrLn stderr (show x)) `seq` x
(Presumably "trace" is defined similarly) One may ask the question: what is seq useful for not in conjunction with unsafePerformIO, other than efficiency. That, I don't know the answer to. - Hal -- Hal Daume III "Computer science is no more about computers | [EMAIL PROTECTED] than astronomy is about telescopes." -Dijkstra | www.isi.edu/~hdaume On Tue, 14 May 2002, Ken Shan wrote: > On 2002-05-14T12:32:30-0400, Jan-Willem Maessen wrote: > > And I'd really much rather we cleaned up the semantics of > > seq---or better yet, fixed the problems with lazy evaluation which > > make seq necessary in the first place. > > A general question: What is seq useful for, other than efficiency? > > -- > Edit this signature at http://www.digitas.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/ken/sig > QUIET! Do you smell something? > _______________________________________________ Haskell mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell
