I’ve seen syntax like:

let !s = f x

from time to time (for example in Marlows Book) but I never reall knew what this really is, nor where I should look for it.

Today I stumpled upon the Bang patterns extension to GHC – and voila – here we go.

So what is it?

If we add the extension we can force evalutation wo WHNF (weak head normal form – more or less evaluated “one step”) by just adding a !(Bang) in front of an identifier – and this extents to pattern-matching as well (this and the fact that is’s shorter to write and better to read makes it so much better then seq).

Here are a few examples showing a bit of it’s power/capabilities:

let makeTuple() = (1+1, 2+2)
let f = makeTuple()
:sprint f
>> f = _

let !f = makeTuple()
:sprint f
>>f = (_,_)