patch applied (packages/HaXml): Use ByteString for output (contributed by Jason Dagit, with modifications)

[Duncan Coutts]

On Tue, 2006-11-14 at 14:53 -0800, Jason Dagit wrote:
> On 11/14/06, Bulat Ziganshin <bulat.ziganshin at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hello Malcolm,
> >
> > Tuesday, November 14, 2006, 8:49:31 PM, you wrote:
> >
> > > involved, which is why I choose a different route.  I am open to further
> > > ideas about how to best achieve a similar effect (i.e. ByteString ops
> > > available, but minimal code duplication).

For minimal code duplication make it generate ByteString internally and
have the String version just call pack/unpack. If I remember correctly,
unpack is lazy (and if it isn't, it should be).

> It would also be nice if the pretty printer came with a version that
> runs in instances of MonadIO so that they write their output eagerly
> instead of lazily.  My experience with haskell tells me that laziness
> is wonderful, especially when you can separate the concerns of
> computation and IO.  But, sometimes it seems that when you move to the
> optimization phase of a project that, that same approach becomes a
> problem and sometimes you end up needing to do your IO as soon/often
> as you can to keep from having poor space behavior.

The Text.PrettyPrint.HughesPJ module can output to various targets using
the fullRender function:

fullRender
:: Mode
Rendering mode
-> Int
Line length
-> Float
Ribbons per line
-> (TextDetails -> a -> a)
What to do with text
-> a
What to do at the end
-> Doc
The document
-> a

So you can produce String, ByteString, do IO directly etc. Note how it
doesn't need MonadIO or anything, it's a pure function.

So for example:

hRender :: Handle -> Doc -> IO ()
hRender h =
  fullRender blah blah blah hPut
  where hPut (Chr c) next = hPutChar h c
        hPut (Str c) next = hPutStr  h s

Note that Text.PrettyPrint.HughesPJ originally envisaged optionally
using a packed string type: the TextDetails has a PStr constructor for a
packed string type. However at the moment that's also just String,
perhaps we should change that to Data.PackedString once the new
implementation of PackedString is available.

Duncan