[Haskell-cafe] Seeking advice on a style question

Steve Schafer steve at fenestra.com
Sun Dec 24 10:21:30 EST 2006


In my text/graphics formatting work, I find myself doing a lot of
"pipeline" processing, where a data structure will undergo a number of
step-by-step transformations from input to output. For example, I have a
function that looks like this (the names have been changed to protect
the innocent--and to focus on the structure):

 process :: a -> b -> c -> d -> e
 process x1 x2 x3 x4 = 
   let y01       = f01 x1 x2 x3;
       y02       = f02 x1;
       y03       = f03 y02;
       y04       = f04 y03;
       y05       = f05 x1 y01 y04;
       y06       = f06 x2 y05;
       (y07,y08) = f07 y01 y06;
       y09       = f08 y07;
       (y10,y11) = f09 x2 x4 y09 y08;
       y12       = f10 y10;
       y13       = f11 y12;
       y14       = f12 x1 x2 x3 y01 y13;
       y15       = f13 y14;
       y16       = f14 y15 y11
       in y16

As you can see, the process is somewhat imperative in overall
appearance, with each intermediate function f01..f14 accepting some
combination of the original input values and/or intermediate values and
returning a new value (or, in some cases, a tuple of values).

Obviously, not all of the steps need to be broken out this way. We can,
for example, skip the second and third steps and directly write:

 y04 = f04 $ f03 $ f02 x1;

Laying it out this way has a couple of advantages. It makes the steps in
the process transparently clear, and if I discover at some point that I
need to make a change (e.g., a new requirement causes f13 to need access
to x2), it's perfectly obvious where to make the modifications.

Nevertheless, it also looks like something that would be amenable to
processing with a State monad, except for one thing: The "shape" of the
state isn't constant throughout the process. At any given step, new
information may be added to the state, and old information may be thrown
away, if there is no further need for it. In principle, it could be
managed with a bunch of nested StateT monads, but my attempts to do so
seem to get so caught up in the bookkeeping that I lose the advantages
mentioned above.

Alternatively, I can wrap all of the state up into a single universal
structure that holds everything I will ever need at every step, but
doing so seems to me to fly in the face of strong typing; at the early
stages of processing, the structure will have "holes" in it that don't
contain useful values and shouldn't be accessed.

So here's the question: Is there a reasonable way to express this kind
of process (where I suppose that "reasonable" means "in keeping with
Haskell-nature") that preserves the advantages mentioned above, but
avoids having to explicitly pass all of the various bits of state
around? The (unattainable?) ideal would be something that looks like
this:

 process = f14 . f13 . ... . f01

or

 process = f01 >>= f02 >>= ... >>= f14

Steve Schafer
Fenestra Technologies Corp.
http://www.fenestra.com/


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