[Haskell-cafe] MaybeT,
guards and run-time pattern matching failure
Udo Stenzel
u.stenzel at web.de
Tue Nov 1 15:24:33 EST 2005
Joel Reymont wrote:
> I'm trying to optimize this and I thought that things that return
> Nothing in the Maybe monad should fail the whole computation
> sequence.
No, it shouldn't. 'return Nothing' ist a perfectly valid result of type
'Maybe (Maybe a)', which is not what you want. However, 'mzero' _does_
fail the whole computation and may backtrack into an alternative if you
used 'mplus' somewhere.
> timeout :: forall a.Int -> IO a -> IO (Maybe a)
> ...
> (ssl', tob, fromb) <- liftIO $ timeout 0 startSSL -- bummer, see below
This is quite understandable, as 'timeout ...' gives a 'Maybe (...)' it
won't match a tuple. Your second idea is right on point:
> (Just h) <- liftIO $ timeout 0 $ connect_ h p -- no complains about this
> but when the connection times out (i'm making it with a delay of 0) I
> get the following runtime error:
A pattern match failure at this point causes 'fail' to be called, which
for exactly this reason is a method of class Monad. You didn't define
it, therefore you get the default behaviour, and that is to call
'error'. The fix is straight forward:
> instance (Monad m) => Monad (MaybeT m) where
> (MaybeT mon) >>= f =
> MaybeT (mon >>= maybe (return Nothing) (runMaybeT . f))
> return = MaybeT . return . Just
> fail _ = MaybeT (return Nothing)
Of couse you could also bind the result of 'timeout' to a variable and
pattern match on that using 'case'. That gives you more freedom and
more ugliness, too.
BTW, if you use 'ErrorT' from Control.Monad.Error instead of MaybeT, you
also get a nice error message instead of a plain Nothing.
Udo.
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