Control.Concurrent.Chan: how do i close a channel?

[Claus Reinke]

>> however, i seem to be missing a way to close a channel?
>> am i misinterpreting this library?
>
> They're not attached to Handles -- that's the IO loop that does the
> writing to the Chan's job -- so they dont' really have a 'close'.

i was indeed looking for a haskell-internal replacement for Handles,
being somewhat surprised that i can't seem to create unattached
Handles with the uls (usual library suspects;-).

think pipes: if an external process takes input via a handle and provides
output via a handle, the haskell equivalent could do the same via a Chan,
so it'd be easy to write mixed pipes.

> When you're done writing, just stop writing.

yes, but any user of getChanContents will be left hanging! that kind
of function doesn't really work well without a way to tell it that it has
nothing more to wait for.

> I often use Chan (Maybe a), with Nothing to tell the reader thread that
> EOF is reached -- perhaps something like that is what you're looking
> for?

yes. but that would add another slight indirection, and it still doesn't
make getChanContents itself any more useable. if you "often" have to
modify/expand the API when you use it, perhaps there is something
missing in that API? the "much like hGetContents" comment does
seem to suggest that as well.

claus