[Haskell-cafe] Name that function =)

Louis J Scoras louis.j.scoras at gmail.com
Tue Dec 12 11:29:11 EST 2006


Hi all;

I'm new to the list, so I just wanted to say hi and -- of course --
ask a quick question:

I have some IO actions that I want to map over a list of pairs --
these are just directory names and their down-cased versions.  It
wasn't difficult to actually get the right behavior by just doing mapM
twice.

    -- putDirs just outputs something like "mv fst snd"
    mapM_ putDirs pairs
    mapM_ (uncurry renameFile) pairs

This bothered me though, because I suspected that this could be done
in one pass.  Naively I proceeded to this.

    mapM_ (putDirs >> (uncurry renameFile)) pairs

Which didn't work.  I thought about it a little more before realizing
that putDirs wouldn't get any parameters this way: I needed some way
to distribute the pair over both operations.  Here's the higher-order
function I needed:

    foo h f g i = h (f i) (g i)

which could then be curried and we get:

    mapM_ (foo (>>) putDirs $ uncurry renameFile) pairs

Works great.  So my question: is there a established name for foo?
What about foo partially applied to (>>)?  This was a fun exercise,
but I'd like to use the standard implementations if they exist.

Thanks!


-- 
Lou.


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