[Haskell-cafe] Automatic file closing after readFile

[Magnus Therning]

On Fri, Oct 19, 2007 at 02:09:01 +1000, Matthew Brecknell wrote:
>Magnus Therning:
>> Just out of curiosity, how would I go about finding this myself?
>> (Ideally it'd be an answer other than "read the source for the libraries
>> you are using". :-)
>
>Well, I can at least try to expand a little on "read the source". :-)
>
>You'll first need a solid understanding of lazy evaluation in the
>context of pure computations. Read about normal evaluation order, WHNF
>(weak head normal form), and which contexts force WHNF. Use pen and
>paper to manually derive the evaluation order for some pure
>computations of your choice (folds over infinite lists would be a good
>start).  Experiment with "seq". Experiment with the various causes of
>stack overflows. Next, understand that while the IO monad is quite
>strict about sequencing actions, its "return" is not strict in its
>argument.  Observe that the combinators in Control.Monad generally do
>not force returned computations. Browse the source of GHC's IO library
>to understand how it sequences IO actions. Read the source for
>unsafePerformIO and unsafeInterleaveIO to understand how and for what
>purposes they allow you to break that sequencing. Next, read the source
>for hGetContents. After all that, you should be a little better
>equipped to diagnose problems with lazy IO!

I'll certainly try to look into all of that.  However, I suspect your
suggestion doesn't scale very well.  On my original code it's easy, it
was less than 10 lines, but how do I know where to start looking if it's
a program of 100 lines, or 1000 lines?  The problem could occur in an
updated library that I just use... Well you get the idea :-)

I can use profiling to find where time and space is spent.  But what
about other finite resources that my program uses, such as file handles?

/M

-- 
Magnus Therning                             (OpenPGP: 0xAB4DFBA4)
magnus＠therning．org             Jabber: magnus．therning＠gmail．com
http://therning.org/magnus
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