[Haskell-cafe] Yet another top-level state proposal

[Adrian Hey]

Hello,

It's nice to see someone else is seriously thinking about this and
I can't see anything obviously wrong with this on first inspection so
by all means add it to the wiki. I have a few issues with it on
aesthetic grounds though. There also seems to be a bit of problem with
using this solution in practice (I'll mention this at the end).

Judah Jacobson wrote:
> In contrast to recent proposals, this one requires no extra syntax or
> use of unsafe functions by the programmer.

I'm not aware of any proposals (recent or ancient:-) that require the
use of unsafe functions by the programmer (well apart from the
unsafePerformIO hack itself). Also adding extra syntax is no problem
these days. It's trivially simple (and indeed desirable in this case
IMHO). It's the underlying compiler magic requires significant extra
work I think.

> ------------------------------------------------
> Under this proposal, we would write instead:
> ------------------------------------------------
> newtype UniqueRef = UniqueRef (IORef Integer)
>                        deriving OnceIO
> 
> instance OnceInit UniqueRef where
>    onceInit = liftM UniqueRef (newIORef 0)

A purely aesthetic objection, but to me it looks quite obfuscated
compared to:

uniqueRef :: IORef Integer
uniqueRef <- ACIO.newIORef 0

But I guess perhaps what's going on here could be made clearer with
the right syntactic sugar :-)

Finally, the useage problem I mentioned. Having to create a distinct
type for each "top level thing with identity" (my terminology)
seems like it could cause difficulties (probably not insoluble
problems though).

If you look at the wiki page you'll see the device driver example I
put there. This has two device handles at the top level (both same
type), with a device driver API that takes either the device handle
itself or a device session handle (which will contain the corresponding
device handle) as parameters (so in principle it can be used with any
number of devices provided the corresponding device handles are
available).

My question is, what would this example look like using the solution
you propose? I can think of at least two possibilities, both of which
seem quite awkward. But I'll leave it to you to think about this
with a bit more care than perhaps I have. It'd be nice to see the
solution on the Wiki too.

Regards
--
Adrian Hey