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No, that's not laziness per se, that's "lazy IO", something somewhat different.

EDIT: It's not even a lazy IO problem since no lazy IO functions are used there.

The problem is laziness. Lazy IO just makes it happen with files, which is more noticeable. In regular lazy code it happens with memory instead (space leaks).

these are not problems, only small details that you have to be careful of..not a large tradeoff to pay

That's like saying that bounds overflow in C isn't a problem, just something you have to be careful of.

To tell you the true, I can't understand why the code the OP talks about has a problem, and I can't even reproduce the problem (and never saw any of the problems of lazy IO in practice either). But I also can not say the code has no problem, and that is a big issue with the language.

> That's like saying that bounds overflow in C isn't a problem, just something you have to be careful of.

I think there's a significant difference between undefined behavior (hello security flaws!) and the program crashing in a (reasonably) well-defined way.

EDIT: I was wrong. It seems to actually just be a hideously inefficient in-memory representation of the data (akin to List[Char]) perhaps plus a space leak.

That's what I get for not reading the code carefully...

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