Lazy streams and unsafeInterleaveIO

[Jyrinx]

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As an experiment for a bigger project, I cooked up a simple program: It 
asks for integers interactively, and after each input, it spits out the 
running total. The wrinkle is that the function for calculating the 
total should be a non-monadic stream function (that is, type [Integer] 
-> [Integer] so that runningTotals [1,2,3,4,5] == [1,3,6,10,15]). The 
task is then to write a function to return a stream of integers, 
grabbing them from IO-land lazily (a la getContents).

My first attempts had it not displaying a running total until all input 
(terminated by an input of 0) had finished, at which point it spit out 
all the totals (i.e. it wasn't an interactive program anymore). I poked 
around in the docs and on the Web for a while, and found out about 
unsafeInterleaveIO, which solved the problem neatly (after I modified 
runningTotals to be less eager, as it was reading ahead by an extra 
integer each time). I ended up with the attached code (for GHC 5.04.2).

My question is this: Is there a more elegant (i.e. non-"unsafe") way to 
do this? I vaguely recall from the Hudak book (which I unfortunately 
don't have convenient at the moment) that he used a channel for 
something like this (the interactive graphics stuff), but IIRC his 
system would be overkill for my application (including the bigger 
project). It doesn't seem like it should need any black magic, and 
concurrency (which channels need, right?) doesn't appear worth the 
hassle. Really, my desire comes down to a simple, safe, single-threaded 
way to write a function to generate a lazy stream. Is there such?

Luke Maurer
jyrinx_list@mindspring.com

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-- running-total
-- Haskell program that takes integers as input, outputting a running total
--      after each input
-- Demonstrates use of lazy streams

module Main where

import IO
import System.IO.Unsafe
import Monad

runningTotals :: [Integer] -> [Integer]
runningTotals [] = []
runningTotals (x:xs) = rt' 0 (x:xs)
    where   rt' tot (x:xs) = (tot+x) `seq` (tot+x):(rt' (tot+x) xs)
            rt' _   []     = []
            
-- Note that runningTotals does what appears to be a stateful calculation when
-- numbers are read one at a time; however, lazy streams allow this to be a
-- pure function. Haskell is cool.

inputNumbers :: IO [Integer]
inputNumbers = do
    x <- putStr "? " >> readLn
    if x == 0 then return [] else do
        xs <- (unsafeInterleaveIO inputNumbers)
        return (x:xs)

main = do
    numbers <- inputNumbers
    mapM_ (putStrLn . (flip shows) "") (runningTotals numbers)

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