[Haskell-cafe] Re: Fwd: Semantics of iteratees, enumerators, enumeratees?

[Ben]

Sorry to be late coming into this conversation.....

Something that has bothered me (which I have mentioned to John Lato
privately) is that it is very easy to write non-compositional code due
to the chunking.  For example, there is a standard function

map :: (a -> b) -> Enumeratee a b c

whose meaning I hope is clear : use the function to transform the type
of a stream and pass it to an iteratee.  However last I checked the
versions provided in both the iteratee and enumerator packages fail to
satisfy the equation

map f (it1 >> it2) == (map f it1) >> (map f it 2)

because of chunking, essentially.  You can check this with f == id and
it1 and it2 are head:

let r = runIdentity . runIteratee

runIdentity $ run $ enumList 10 [1..100] $ r $ joinI $ map id $ r (head >> head)
--> Right (Just 2)

runIdentity $ run $ enumList 10 [1..100] $ r $ joinI $ (map id $ r
head) >> (map id $ r head)
--> Right (Just 11)

It is possible to fix this behavior, but it complicates the "obvious"
definitions a lot.

B

On Wed, Sep 1, 2010 at 5:10 AM, Heinrich Apfelmus
<apfelmus at quantentunnel.de> wrote:
> Tilo Wiklund wrote:
>>
>> Daniel Fischer wrote:
>>>
>>> [...]
>>> Well, I just gave an example where one would want chunking for reasons
>>> other than performance. That iteratees don't provide the desired
>>> functionality is a different matter.
>>> [...]
>>
>> In the case of hashing, wouldn't it be more reasonable to consider
>> iterators over streams of fixed (or at least predictable) sized chunks
>> (where a set of chunks can themselves be chunked), with the chunking
>> behaviour being given by another iteratee over the original stream?
>>
>> It seems to me that one of the major points of iteratees is to provide
>> an abstraction from the kind of chunking irrelevant to the parsing
>> logic, otherwise I fail to see any difference (at least relevant to
>> chunking) to plain strict IO.
>
> I thought so, too, but I was informed[1] that iteratees are just a small
> step up the abstraction ladder. The difference compared to an ordinary file
>  Handle  is that you can now reuse one and the same iteratee for reading
> from a  String , for instance, without changing the source code of the
> iteratee.
>
> Furthermore, iteratees can be suspended, which facilities resource
> management like closing files handles after they've been read.
>
>  [1]:
> http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/ar4wb/understanding_iteratees/c0j0f3r
>
>
>
> Regards,
> Heinrich Apfelmus
>
> --
> http://apfelmus.nfshost.com
>
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