[Haskell-cafe] Re: Google Summer of Code 2009

[John Lato]

Johan Tibell wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 12, 2009 at 2:12 AM, Felipe Lessa <felipe.lessa at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Do we already have enough information to turn
>> http://okmij.org/ftp/Haskell/Iteratee/ into a nice, generic, cabalized
>> package? I think Iteratees may prove themselves as useful as
>> ByteStrings.
>
> I still haven't figured out what the "correct" definition of Iteratee
> would look like. The Iteratee code that Oleg wrote seems to have the
> structure of some kind of "two level" monad. I think that's the reason
> for the frequent occurrences of >>== and liftI in the code. There
> seems to be some things we yet have to discover about Iteratees.
>

I concur.  I've recently been involved with several discussions on
this topic, and there are some issues that remain.  The "two level
monad" part doesn't bother me, but I think the type should be slightly
more abstract and I'm not sure of the best way to do so.  IMO liftI is
used more because of Oleg's particular style of coding than anything
else.  I don't think it need be common in user code, although it may
be more efficient.

I think that, if a GSOC project were to focus on Iteratees, it would
need to look at issues like these.  I can't judge as to whether this
is an appropriate amount of work for GSOC, however simply packaging
and cabal-izing Oleg's Iteratee work (or Johan's, or my own) is likely
of too small a scope.

John Lato