[Haskell-cafe] The Transient monad
Twan van Laarhoven
twanvl at gmail.com
Tue Dec 8 17:05:04 EST 2009
Alberto G. Corona wrote:
> Hi haskell cafe:
>
> concerning Stable Names
>
> The IO in makeStableName suggest more side effects than makeStableName
> really do. But still the call isn't pure.
>
> For calls such are makeStableName that gives a different result the
> FIRST time they are called but return the same result every time in the
> same session, I suggest to use a Transient monad:
makeStableName doesn't really give 'the same result every time', though. For
example:
*> let sn x = hashStableName <$> makeStableName x
*> let x = replicate 3 'x' in (,) <$> sn x <* evaluate x <*> sn x
(18,17)
After x is evaluated in this example, its stable name changes.
Perhaps instead of Transient we could use a name that makes it more clear what
is going on, perhaps "ObservingEvaluation". That could also include exception
handling, by the way.
> makeStableName :: a -> Transient (StableName a)
Why not wrap it up in a class?
class Monad m => MonadObservingEvaluation m where
-- what should go here? perhaps:
liftOE :: ObservingEvaluation a -> m a
Then we can have
makeStableName :: MonadObservingEvaluation m => a -> m (StableName a)
Which works both in IO and the new monad.
Twan
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