[Haskell-cafe] Process properties as global values

[Volker Wysk]

On Sun, 4 Jul 2004, Alastair Reid wrote:

> > I'm just wondering, why haven't process properties (such as the command
> > line arguments, or the parent process id), which are inherently global,
> > been made global values in the Haskell standard? You could avoid
> > needlessly carrying around these values, you wouldn't need to lift some
> > functions into the IO monad...
>
> This is true and you don't break purity and common programming tasks become a
> bit easier because you need less plumbing.  One argument against doing so is
> that it will make data dependencies less obvious.
>
> At the moment, if you want to know where your data goes, you can usually
> follow a path from where it is read from a file (or whatever) through to
> where it is passed to a function which uses it.   I've found this very useful
> in the past and wish it applied to my current project (a joint project with a
> very good C programmer and written in C).
>
> I don't know if this is a conclusive argument but it's certainly true that
> making process properties global would make it harder to find what code
> depends on the command line, environment, etc. and understanding a program
> _might_ become harder.

You have a point. Functions will get implicit input values, much like
global variables in imperative languages. They won't be self-contained any
longer. Of course functions refer other functions/values, but these are
true constants (meaning values). Global values like command line arguments
are constant only for the given run of the program.

However, I have a bunch of shell scripts written in Haskell (using
HsUnix), with actions depending on some command line arguments all the
time. It's cumbersome to carry them around all the time. On the other
hand, it's not such a big deal either...

I'll try it out, making these arguments global values, using
unsafePerformIO. It must be assessed whether the greater simplicity
outweights the obfuscation added by the "implicit arguments".

Cheers,
V.W.

--
Volker Wysk <post at volker-wysk.de>
http://www.volker-wysk.de