[Haskell-cafe] Haskell scripting system (please help me simplify the design)

[Joel Reymont]

Robert,

On Oct 27, 2005, at 4:59 PM, Robert Dockins wrote:

> You could consider creating a monad for the "unstuff" part of the  
> operation that would hide dealing with the FastString, the tupling  
> and the case analysis on Maybe.

Could you elaborate on this a bit please? How would I write and use  
such a monad?

> If you end up doing a lot of instances like this, the monad could  
> well be a win;  it also gives you the opportunity to add error  
> reporting during the parse if you want.

This is exactly the problem I'm facing now. Parsing is failing and I  
need to take apart my pure code just for testing. How would you code  
this monad?

> As a side note, I see you are doing a bunch of operations on lists  
> of properties.  If performance is an issue, you might want to  
> consider using Data.Map or similar.  If your properties lists can  
> get big, mergeprops looks like a potential problem (   O( n*(n+m) )  
> each time it's called   ).

What would I use as the key for each map entry? If I knew this then I  
could use a map :-). As it stands, each property is a solid chunk and  
I can't even extract the name of the attribute it was created with. I  
don't think Map lets me index on Strings, does it?

Since I end up modifying properties a lot I think I sould use monads  
but I need to read up to get a clear picture.

     Joel

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