[Haskell-beginners] A first try

[Manfred Lotz]

On Sun, 26 Jun 2011 15:02:07 -0400
David Place <d at vidplace.com> wrote:

> 
> On Jun 26, 2011, at 1:29 PM, Manfred Lotz wrote:
> 
> > When I stumbled upon lazy IO newbie-wise I was pointed to withFile
> > resp. bracket by Daniel Fischer and now that I know how to do it it
> > seems fine to me. It also alerted me to pay more attention to
> > lazyness as this is a Haskell immanent thingie. 
> 
> Of course, it is possible to use hGetContents with withFile.  You can
> still get into trouble because hGetContents is unsafe.  Beginners get
> tripped up trying to do something like the following getting
> unexpected results. (i remember I did.)
> 
> print10 = 
>      do
>        contents <- withFile "/usr/share/dict/words" ReadMode (\h ->
> hGetContents h) print $ take 10 contents
> 
> So, you have to do this keeping in mind a rather procedural model of
> the evaluation of the lazy data structures.  I feel this is not very
> declarative or intuitive.
> 
> print10' = 
>      do
>        h <- openFile "/usr/share/dict/words" ReadMode
>        contents <- hGetContents h
>        print $ take 10 contents
>        hClose h
> 
> Iteratee IO provides a declarative way to do this that is safe,
> compositional and efficient.  But not yet very pretty.  In haskell
> cafe, John Lato says that he is working on that.
> 
> 

Thanks for showing this. I have to admit that I'm as a beginner not in
a position to judge about the merits of Iteratee IO versus the standard
way. Just wanted to point out that the way I work thru the XML files in
my particular task seems to work fine. I will watch what happens to
Iteratee IO. 

Is there any problem in the code snippet I pasted? If so I would
like to get a hint of course.


-- 
Thanks,
Manfred