[Haskell-cafe] ANNOUNCE: pqueue-mtl, stateful-mtl

[Louis Wasserman]

I follow.  The primary issue, I'm sort of wildly inferring, is that use of
STT -- despite being pretty much a State monad on the inside -- allows
access to things like mutable references?

More serious question: The issue of nondeterministic branching and the State
monad is something that's occurred to me previously.  Do I understand
correctly that this would require use of an arrow transformer, rather than a
monad?  For a generic State monad, that would be something like

newtype StateArrow a x y = SA (a (s, x) (s,y))

and then StateArrow (Kleisli []) x y translates into approximately (s, x) ->
[(s, y)], as desired?

Louis Wasserman
wasserman.louis at gmail.com


On Sun, Feb 15, 2009 at 4:06 PM, Reid Barton <rwbarton at math.harvard.edu>wrote:

> On Sun, Feb 15, 2009 at 09:59:28PM -0000, Sittampalam, Ganesh wrote:
> > > Stateful-mtl provides an ST monad transformer,
> >
> > Is this safe? e.g. does it work correctly on [], Maybe etc?
> >
> > If not this should be flagged very prominently in the documentation.
>
> It is not safe: it has the same problem as the STMonadTrans package,
> discussed recently here:
>
>
> http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/glasgow-haskell-users/2009-February/016554.html
>
> The following code demonstrates that STT violates referential
> transparency:
>
> > import Control.Monad
> > import Data.STRef
> > import Control.Monad.Trans
> > import Control.Monad.ST.Trans
> >
> > data Tree a = Leaf a | Branch (Tree a) (Tree a) deriving Show
> >
> > instance Monad Tree where
> >   return = Leaf
> >   Leaf a >>= k = k a
> >   Branch l r >>= k = Branch (l >>= k) (r >>= k)
> >
> > foo :: STT s Tree Integer
> > foo = do
> >   x <- liftST $ newSTRef 0
> >   y <- lift (Branch (Leaf 1) (Leaf 2))
> >   when (odd y) (liftST $ writeSTRef x y)
> >   liftST $ readSTRef x
> >
> > main :: IO ()
> > main = do
> >   print $ runSTT foo
> >   let Branch _ (Leaf x) = runSTT foo
> >   print x
>
> outputting:
>
> Branch (Leaf 1) (Leaf 1)
> 0
>
> Demanding the value in the left Leaf affects the value seen in the
> right Leaf.
>
> Regards,
> Reid
>
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