[Haskell-cafe] Re: Iteratee question

[Valery V. Vorotyntsev]

On Thu, Nov 26, 2009 at 10:17 AM,  <oleg at okmij.org> wrote:
> You are correct: i2 and i3 can process a chunk of elements at a time,
> if an enumerator supplies it. That means an iteratee like i2 or i3 can
> do more work per invocation -- which is always good. Since you have to
> get the results as a list, you pretty much have to use stream2list. It
> should be noted that stream2list isn't very efficient: it returns the
> accumulated list only when it is done -- which happens when the stream
> is terminated, normally or abnormally. So, stream2list has a terrible
> latency, and is useful only at the last stage of processing. I found
> it is most useful for testing (to see the resulting stream) and for
> writing Unit tests (to compare the produced results with the
> expected). For incremental processing, it is better to stay within
> Iteratees.
>
> Although I think i2 and i3 should be close in performance (only
> benchmarking can tell for sure, of course), i3 is more extensible
> because stream2list is at the end of the chain. If later on further
> processing is required (or, the latency imposed by stream2list becomes
> noticeable), the chain can be easily extended. The advantage of the
> arrangement of i3 is that if some Iteratee further down the chain
> decided that it has had enough (elements), Iter.take can quickly skip
> the remaining elements without the need to convert them.

Thanks for clarification!

-- 
vvv