[Haskell-cafe] Re: Where do I put the seq?

[Peter Verswyvelen]

I don't fully understand.
interact gives you a stream of input characters that the user types, and
produces a stream of output characters that are displayed back (with
buffering set to NoBuffering). it should behave predictable no?

and since the input that the user gives depends on the output on the screen
(it represents the user <-> machine dialog loop), we must make sure that
laziness does not go wild and strictness is needed to respect this
dependency. But as Ryan showed, seq is not really needed (but pattern
matching is), and his code is super elegant and simple. I also remember from
the Haskell School of Expression that putting lazy pattern matches (in
switch if I recall correctly) here and there is needed to avoid blocking or
inf loops. Also in Reactive this was important. In Yampa you need to mark
the outputs strict to avoid delayed computations from building up  (like sum
and foldl does). So it seems finding a good balance between strictness and
laziness is really important in FRP, at least for the engine, and in the
case of Yampa, also for the end user.

E.g in Ryans cleanup, if you replace inp  by

inp :: S String
inp = S $ \i -> (tail i, D.empty, head i)

then the ordering of input to output is incorrect, too much output is
printed before the input is requested. it clearly demonstrates the effect of
laziness to me really, in a much easier to observe way than stack overflows
or infinite loops no?

how is interact different from a graphical user interface system or game
simulation, in which the input is a stream of events (or behaviors, samples,
whatever) from mouse, keyboard, timers, etc, and the output is a list of
pictures or geometry?

The tutorial I would like to make is exactly for this kind of feedback from
domain experts, so maybe "tutorial" is not the correct word, more a
discussion or journey.

Anyway I don't think I'm qualified to make a tutorial since I'm still
learning the basics, but with feedback from you guys (I already have
interest from Hai (Paul) Liu (Yampa) and Patai Gergely (Elerea) it might
still become a valuable resource?

On Thu, Aug 20, 2009 at 11:52 AM, Jules Bean <jules at jellybean.co.uk> wrote:

> Peter Verswyvelen wrote:
>
>> Not at all, use it for whatever you want to :-)
>>
>> I'm writing this code because I'm preparing to write a bunch of tutorials
>> on FRP, and I first wanted to start with simple console based FRP, e.g.
>> making a little text adventure game, where the input/choices of the user
>> might be parsed ala parsec, using monadic style, applicative style, and
>> arrows, and then doing the same with FRP frameworks like
>>
>
>
> This is a really bad place to start a FRP tutorial IMO.
>
> The interface for 'interact' does not make any promises about the relative
> evaluation order of the input list / production order of the output list.
>
> That's why you are having to play horrible tricks with seq to try to force
> the order to be what you want.
>
> I don't think this is the basis of a robust system or a sensible tutorial.
>
> Just my 2c.
>
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