Note [User-defined RULES for seq]

Roman found situations where he had
      case (f n) of _ -> e
where he knew that f (which was strict in n) would terminate if n did.
Notice that the result of (f n) is discarded. So it makes sense to
transform to
      case n of _ -> e

Rather than attempt some general analysis to support this, I've added
enough support that you can do this using a rewrite rule:

  RULE "f/seq" forall n.  seq (f n) = seq n

You write that rule.  When GHC sees a case expression that discards
its result, it mentally transforms it to a call to 'seq' and looks for
a RULE.  (This is done in GHC.Core.Opt.Simplify.trySeqRules.)  As usual, the
correctness of the rule is up to you.

VERY IMPORTANT: to make this work, we give the RULE an arity of 1, not 2.
If we wrote
  RULE "f/seq" forall n e.  seq (f n) e = seq n e
with rule arity 2, then two bad things would happen:

  - The magical desugaring done in Note [seqId magic] item (b)
    for saturated application of 'seq' would turn the LHS into
    a case expression!

  - The code in GHC.Core.Opt.Simplify.rebuildCase would need to actually supply
    the value argument, which turns out to be awkward.

See also: Note [User-defined RULES for seq] in GHC.Core.Opt.Simplify.