[Haskell-cafe] flip fix and iterate (was: Lazy IO and closing of file handles)

[Matthew Brecknell]

Pete Kazmier:
> I understand the intent of this code, but I am having a hard time
> understanding the implementation, specifically the combination of
> 'fix', 'flip', and 'interate'.  I looked up 'fix' and I'm unsure how
> one can call 'flip' on a function that takes one argument.

I threw that in there because I figured you were up for another
challenge. :-)

It took me ages to get some clue about how to use fix, quite apart from
combining it with flip. The concept of passing the output of a function
as one of its parameters ("tying the knot") can be difficult to accept,
particularly if you haven't studied lambda calculus. Note that I could
have just written this:

> let iterate a = do
>   ... iterate a' ...
> iterate accum

Or this:

> fix iterate accum
> where
>   iterate a = do
>     ... iterate a' ...

Though with the latter, I presume you would still be confused about how
I can pass two arguments to a function that only takes one. Actually,
that's not that difficult. Say I have a function "f" that takes two
arguments. Then I could write:

> (id f) a b

No problem. But function application associates to the left (at least in
value-land), so I could just as easily write:

> id f a b

You could say I was passing three arguments to id, which only takes one
argument. But id returns its first argument, so I'm really just passing
the last two arguments to the function returned by id.

So with my use of "flip fix", I'm really just calling fix on the
anonymous function (\iterate accum -> ...), and then the parameter
("accum") is passed to the function returned by fix. So now you just
need a couple of weeks (or months if you're as slow as me) to understand
what fix is all about... :-)

There is the question of whether it's preferable to use the "let" form
or the "fix" form for embedding a recursive function in the middle of a
do-block. I don't know if there's any consensus on this question, but it
seems to me to be about whether one prefers to read a function top-down
or bottom-up. I think I'm about 80/20 top-down/bottom-up. When I read a
"let", I know (due to laziness) that it doesn't have any effect until
the bindings are used, so I usually find myself scanning forward to find
those uses. When I read "fix \f -> ...", I see exactly how the
(anonymous) function is used, just before I get to its definition. So
fix helps me to see things in a mostly top-down fashion.

A couple of times I have wished that the libraries contained
"pre-flipped" versions of fix, for example:

> fix1 a f = fix f a
> fix2 a b f = fix f a b
> fix3 a b c f = fix f a b c

Any opinions on whether this would be a worthwhile addition? Or would it
just legitimise an obscure idiom?