Detect obvious cases of infinite recursion.
Pure functions are guaranteed to return the same value if the same arguments are used. Because of that, a compiler could be able to detect infinite recursion in the form of a function calling itself with the same arguments (case, some distracted programmer forgot to apply the function tail to a list). The way I see it, one of Haskell's main selling points is that it helps the programmer to avoid sources of bugs as much as it can, and infinite recursion is one of the few that stand unchecked. I specifically point to this example because both, I'm a newbie and made that newbie mistake, and think it shouldn't be hard to implement to the parsing stage of the compiler/interpreter. It probably should throw an error when this happens in pure functions, and maybe an opt-in warning if it happens in monads.
Trac metadata
| Trac field | Value |
|---|---|
| Version | 7.8.2 |
| Type | FeatureRequest |
| TypeOfFailure | OtherFailure |
| Priority | normal |
| Resolution | Unresolved |
| Component | Compiler |
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