What are Haskell's strictness points?

Question

We all know (or should know) that Haskell is lazy by default. Nothing is evaluated until it must be evaluated. So when must something be evaluated? There are points where Haskel

Answer 1

A good place to start is by understanding this paper: A Natural Semantics for Lazy Evalution (Launchbury). That will tell you when expressions are evaluated for a small language similar to GHC's Core. Then the remaining question is how to map full Haskell to Core, and most of that translation is given by the Haskell report itself. In GHC we call this process "desugaring", because it removes syntactic sugar.

Well, that's not the whole story, because GHC includes a whole raft of optimisations between desugaring and code generation, and many of these transformations will rearrange the Core so that things get evaluated at different times (strictness analysis in particular will cause things to be evaluated earlier). So to really understand how your program will be evaluated, you need to look at the Core produced by GHC.

Perhaps this answer seems a bit abstract to you (I didn't specifically mention bang patterns or seq), but you asked for something precise, and this is about the best we can do.