newbie: running a state transformer in context of a state rea der

[Konst Sushenko]

Marcin,

thanks for your help.

to implement the lift functionality i added these well
known definitions:


class (Monad m, Monad (t m)) => TransMonad t m where
    lift               :: m a -> t m a

instance (Monad m, Monad (State s m)) => TransMonad (State s) m where
    lift m              = ST (\s -> m >>= (\a -> return (a,s)))



but my lookahead function

lookahead p = do { s <- fetch
                 ; lift (evalState p s)
                 }

is typed as

lookahead :: State MyState Maybe a -> State MyState Maybe (a,MyState)

but i need

lookahead :: State MyState Maybe a -> State MyState Maybe a

apparently, the (>>=) and return used in the definition of lift above are
for the monad (State s m), and not monad m...

everything works if i do not use the TransMonad class, but define lift
manually as:

lift :: Parser a -> Parser a
lift m = ST (\s -> unST m s >>= (\(a,_) -> return (a,s)))

but this looks like a special case of the lift above, except the right hand
side of
'bind' is executed in the right context.

i am still missing something

konst


-----Original Message-----
From: Marcin 'Qrczak' Kowalczyk [mailto:qrczak@knm.org.pl]
Sent: Tuesday, February 20, 2001 10:17 AM
To: haskell-cafe@haskell.org
Subject: Re: newbie: running a state transformer in context of a state
reader


Mon, 19 Feb 2001 18:07:17 -0800, Konst Sushenko <konsu@microsoft.com> pisze:

> now i am curious if it is possible to run the given parser (state
> transformer) in a context of a state reader somehow, so as the state
> gets preserved automatically. something that would let me omit the
> calls to fetch and set methods.

It should be possible to do something like this:

lookahead:: Parser a -> Parser a
lookahead p = do { s <- fetch
                 ; lift (evalState p s)
                 }

where evalState :: Monad m => State s m a -> s -> m a
      lift      :: Monad m => m a -> State s m a
are functions which should be available or implementable in a monad
transformer framework. I don't have the Hutton/Meijer's paper at hand
so I don't know if they provided them and under which names. Such
functions are provided e.g. in the framework provided with ghc (by
Andy Gill, inspired by Mark P Jones' paper "Functional Programming
with Overloading and Higher-Order Polymorphism").

This definition of lookahead uses a separate state transformer thread
instead of making changes in place and undoing them later. I don't
think that it could make sense to convert a state transformer to
a state reader by replacing its internals, because p does want to
transform the state locally; a value of type Parser a represents
a state transformation. The changes must be isolated from the main
parser, but they must happen in some context.

-- 
 __("<  Marcin Kowalczyk * qrczak@knm.org.pl http://qrczak.ids.net.pl/
 \__/
  ^^                      SYGNATURA ZASTEPCZA
QRCZAK


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