[Haskell-cafe] Monad transformers [Stacking monads]

[Andrew Coppin]

Daniel Fischer wrote:
> Am Dienstag, 7. Oktober 2008 20:27 schrieb Andrew Coppin:
>   
>> Basically, the core code is something like
>>
>>   raw_bind :: (Monad m) => [[x]] -> (x -> m (ResultSet y)) -> m
>> (ResultSet y)
>>   raw_bind [] f = return empty
>>   raw_bind (xs:xss) f = do
>>     rsYs <- mapM f xs
>>     rsZ <- raw_bind xss f
>>     return (foldr union (cost rsZ) rsYs)
>>
>> As you can see, this generates all of rsZ before attempting to return
>> anything to the caller. And I'm really struggling to see any way to
>> avoid that.
>>
>>     
>
> Maybe it is as simple as
>
> raw_bind (xs:xss) f = do
>      rsYs <- mapM f xs
>      ~rsZ <- raw_bind xss f
>      return (foldr union (cost rsZ) rsYs)
>
> then rsZ should only be evaluated when it's needed
>   

Ooo... "lazy pattern matching"? Can somebody explain to me, _very 
slowy_, exactly what that means?

If I'm doing this right, it seems that

  rsZ <- raw_bind xss f
  ...

desugards to

  raw_bind xss f >>= \rsZ -> ...

If I'm not mistaken, the rsZ variable shouldn't be evaluated until 
needed *anyway*, so what is lazy pattern matching buying me here?

Also, suppose I stack ResultSetT on top of IO. In that case, "f" is 
allowed to perform externally-visible I/O operations. If there really 
*is* a way to delay the execution of certain calls until the data is 
needed... well that doesn't look right somehow. In fact, it looks like 
what I'm trying to do *should* be impossible. :-/ Oh dear...