Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by kccqzy 43 days ago
Yes! In lazy but immutable languages like Haskell, it is totally fine to refer to the value itself during definition. This is really the same idea that a recursive function can refer to itself during definition. It’s common to define a variable for the infinite list of prime numbers, where the definition requires the list of prime numbers itself.

    primes = 2 : sieve primes [3..]
    sieve (p:ps) xs = let (h, t) = span (< p*p) xs in h ++ sieve ps (filter (\n -> rem n p > 0) t)
Here `primes` is a variable that refers to itself in its definition (called corecursion), and `sieve` is a recursive function.