[Haskell-cafe] Practical Haskell question.

[Daniil Elovkov]

2007/6/25, Michael T. Richter <ttmrichter at gmail.com>:
>
>  Now I've got a situation I can't figure out how to resolve.  I want to have a set of actions which are executed sequentially, but which, before I even start to execute the first one, have been inspected for legality and/or plausibility.  Consider this kind of sequence:
>
>  do
>    x <- performActionA
>    y <- performActionB
>    z <- performActionC
>    return $ calculateStuff x y z
>
>  Now obviously this is going to be in a monad of some kind.  Were this a regular, run-of-the-mill program I'd just use the IO monad.  But what I want to do instead is, before executing any of the perform* functions, check that the actions desired are actually permitted (or possible) given a set of circumstances.  For example let's say it's a permissions issue and performActionB can only be done if I'm root.  If I'm not root I don't want performActionA done because I can't complete the transaction.  (Maybe ActionA is non-reversible, say.)  Or let's say this is code that's accessing databases on the network.  If the network link to C can't be established, I don't want to screw around with A and B's links at all -- it's too expensive, too time-consuming or whatever.
>
>  Were I programming this in C, C++, Python, Ruby, etc. I could do this in my sleep.  Functions are addresses (C/C++) or objects with an ID (Python/Ruby) so it's possible to take them and do some kind of check based on identities before executing things (although the scaffolding around this would be nontrivial in any of these languages except, possibly, Ruby).  Functions in Haskell don't have this property, however, so I can't figure out what I'd do to perform similar work.  I'm sure there's a way to do it, but I just can't see it.


Hello, I would suggest defining your own data type an instance of
monad. The sense of it would be 'sequantial IO operations which you
can do some checks on'.

It would have some flags and properties along with the IO computation
itself. Operations (>>) and (>>=) would construct more complex
computations from simple ones, and since your data type is not opaque
to you, you could inspect those complex computations for properties,
too. Including synergetic ones, like 'this is never done, after that
has been invoked...'

And then you will have to have a conventional runYourMonad function,
which will be an IO computation. It could be the place, where the
validity check occurs.

The data type could be the list of operations, or probably a tree-like
structure to account for branching.

The downside is you would have to supply those flags, but you could
define some lifting functions, like
flag :: Flags -> IO a -> YourMonad a
do
  flag OnlyRoot ioOperation
  flag someComplexFlag anotherOperation


Daniil Elovkov