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We present a light-weight tool called Sloth which assists programmers in identifying unnecessarily strict first order functions. Sloth reports counterexamples in form of a partial value, the corresponding result of the tested function and a recommended result. We present examples where the hints reported by Sloth can be used to improve a function with respect to memory behaviour, non-termination, and performance in the context of functional-logic programming. Furthermore we give an example-driven introduction into the basics of the implementation of Sloth. To improve the results in comparison to an existing approach we use additional constraints to assure that Sloth΄s suggestions are implementable without employing parallelism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Web applications are complex software artefacts whose creation and maintenance is not feasible without abstractions, or models. Many special-purpose languages are used today as notations for these models. We show that functional programming languages can be used as modelling languages, offering substantial benefits. The precision and expressive power of functional languages helps in developing concise and maintainable specifications. We demonstrate our approach with the help of a simple example web site, using Haskell as the implementation language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]