[Haskell-beginners] A first try

[Heinrich Apfelmus]

David Place wrote:
> Heinrich Apfelmus wrote:
> 
>> Personally, I think that lazy IO is not a weakness and works 
>> extremely well for prototyping. In contrast, I find IterateeIO to 
>> be ugly and non-idiomatic Haskell, since it exposes implementation 
>> details and is not built on an algebraic "combinators & laws" 
>> approach. Being challenging to understand is not a substitute for 
>> beauty.
> 
> Interesting, I appreciate your point of view.   My experience with 
> Lazy IO is that its non-determinism breaks down the 
> algebraic/equational intuition.  In order to manage handle resources,
> I must have in mind too many operational details.

Well, one could say that it's the fault of the operating system for not 
doing garbage collection on file handles (c.f. Oberon).

> I feel that iteratee IO encapsulates these in nice compositional
> combinators.

What about the combinator

   withFile :: FilePath -> (String -> a) -> IO a
   withFile name f = bracket (openFile name ReadMode) hClose $ \h ->
       evaluate . f =<< hGetContents h

? It gives you the same thing as Iteratees - a way to apply a function 
to the contents of a file - without the need to rewrite all the existing 
list functions like  map , lines , words , and so on.

> I agree that it's not very beautiful, though.  My feeling is that it
> is not quite finished.  Perhaps there are a couple of more insights
> that will make it really nice.

I'm all for beauty in programming.


Best regards,
Heinrich Apfelmus

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