[Haskell-cafe] using an external application

[Don Stewart]

lemming:
> 
> On Fri, 2 Nov 2007, Felipe Lessa wrote:
> 
> > On 11/2/07, Stuart Cook <scook0 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > The solution would be to use a version of "readFile" that works in a
> > > stricter way, by reading the file when it's told to, but I don't have
> > > an implementation handy.
> >
> > I guess this does the job:
> >
> > > readFile' fp = do
> > >   contents <- readFile fp
> > >   let ret (x:xs) = x `seq` ret xs
> > >       ret []     = return contents
> > >   ret contents
> >
> > Maybe the "x `seq`" part isn't necessary at all.
> 
> Awful. It reminds me on MatLab where the developers have implemented many
> automatisms which do arbitrary clever things in every corner case, but
> nothing consistent, because they thought programmers want it that way.
> Then the programmers must write wrappers in order to get functions with
> consistent behaviour around the fully automated functions.
> 
> The "unlazying" procedure looks much like the "lazying" one, and I wonder
> whether it would be a good idea to eventually add "readFileStrict",
> "getContentStrict" and "hGetContentStrict" to the standard library.

Yes, I have often thought System.IO.Strict should be added to the strict
package on hackage, maybe in terms of bytestring.readFile >>= return .
unpack, since we're being strict anyway.

The above is also a rather odd implementation of readFile', which is
usually implemented by forcing the last element of the list instead.

-- Don