[Haskell-cafe] Software Tools in Haskell

[gwern0 at gmail.com]

On 2007.12.12 12:51:58 -0600, Tommy M McGuire <mcguire at crsr.net> scribbled 2.7K characters:
> Gwern Branwen wrote:
>> Some of those really look like they could be simpler, like 'copy' -
>> couldn't that simply be 'main = interact (id)'?
>> Have you seen <http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Simple_Unix_tools>?
>> For example, 'charcount' could be a lot simpler - 'charcount = showln
>> . length' would work, wouldn't it, for the core logic, and the whole
>> thing might look like:
>>> main = do (print . showln . length) =<< getContents
>> Similarly wordcount could be a lot shorter, like 'wc_l = showln .
>> length . lines'
>> (showln is a convenience function: showln a = show a ++ "\n")
>
> Yes, that's absolutely true, and I am adding a section showing
> implementations based on interact as soon as I send this message.  The
> reason I didn't do so before is that I was trying to (to an extent)
> preserve the structure of the original implementations, which means using
> an imperative style.

Yes, I'm looking at it now. Pretty nice.

> Strangely, I have considerably more confidence in the imperative-ish
> Haskell code than I do in the imperative Pascal code, in spite of the fact
> that they are essentially the same.  Probably this is due to the
> referential transparency that monadic IO preserves and that does not even
> enter into the picture in traditional Pascal.  For example, the
> pseudo-nroff implementation has a giant, horrible block of a record
> (containing the state taken directly from K&P) that is threaded through the
> program, but I am tolerably happy with it because I know that is the *only*
> state going through the program.
>
> Further, while interact could probably handle all of the filter-style
> programs (and if I understand correctly, could also work for the main loop
> of the interactive editor)

If your editor is referentially transparent, I think. Something like ed or sed could be done, as long as you didn't implement any of the IO stuff (like ! for ed).

> and a similar function could handle the later
> file-reading programs, I do not see how to generalize that to the
> out-of-core sort program.

Well, for out-of-core sort, someone several many months back posted a very neat solution using ByteStrings which iirc had performance as competitive as GNU sort's out-of-core sort....

[much searching later]

Ah! Here we go: "[Haskell-cafe] External Sort and unsafeInterleaveIO" <http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2007-July/029156.html>. I at least found it interesting.

> (Plus, interact is scary. :-D )

It's not scary! It's neat!

>> I... I want to provide a one-liner for 'detab', but it looks
>> impressively monstrous and I'm not sure I understand it.
>
> If you think that's bad.... :-)
>
> detab is one of the programs I do not like.  I kept the "direct
> translation" approach up through that, but I think it really hides the
> simplicity there; detab copies its input to its output replacing tabs with
> 1-8 spaces, based on where the tab occurs in a line.  The only interesting
> state dealt with is the count of characters on each line, but that gets
> hidden, not emphasized.
>
> On the other hand, I'm not looking for one-liners; I really want clarity as
> opposed to cleverness.

Well, one-liners generally can be expanded to 2 or 3 lines if you want to add descriptive variable names. Better to start with a short version and expand it where unclear than have a long unclear one in the first place, right?

>> One final comment: as regards run-length encoding, there's a really
>> neat way to do it. I wrote a little article on how to do it a while
>> ago, so I guess I'll just paste it in here. :)
>
> That *is* neat.
>
> --
> Tommy M. McGuire

Thanks. It took a while to write, but I never really found any place to put it up for other people to read.

--
gwern
GSM Submarine E. 510 ddnp building y friends RDI JCET
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/attachments/20080106/e4f56854/attachment.bin