[Haskell-cafe] GUIs, FRP, (Delimited) Continuations and Zippers

[GüŸnther Schmidt]

Hi all,

In my app, there is one part which has a rather complicated GUI logic, 
it involves n drop downs with n choices each.

Whenever the current selection in one of the drop downs changes by user 
interaction, the other (n-1) drop downs need to be notified and their 
item list need to possible change too.

Now I have managed to code all this and it actually behaves correctly. 
But I'm also using tons of IORefs and tons of bookkeeping code for it. 
While I'd not be ashamed to show any other part of my code to another 
Haskeller, this part of the code is the most clumsiest I've ever written.

And I have no clue if that piece of code *can* be written in any other 
way, ie. without the tons of IORefs and bookkeeping.

The GUI library is WXHaskell.

In the last few days I read up on Conal Elliotts FRP stuff (reactive) 
but also on Olegs ZFS (Zippers, Delimited Continuations), the latter 
leaving me totally baffled.

Could either of those approaches (FRP / Delimited Continuations) be a 
solution for implementing complex GUI code?

Günther