[Haskell-cafe] Is it safe to use unsafePerformIO here?

[Cristiano Paris]

On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 10:11 PM, Cristiano Paris <frodo at theshire.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 10:08 PM, Cristiano Paris <frodo at theshire.org> wrote:
>> ...
>> So, it seems that "seq b" is completely ineffective and program is not correct.
>
> Correction: removing "seq b" results in nothing being displayed :)
>
> So, it's not "completely" effective. I suspect this is related to the
> fact that a String in Haskell is just a list of Char so we should use
> seq on every element of b. Let me try...

Now it works as expected:

---
module Main where

import System.IO
import System.IO.Unsafe
import Control.Applicative
import Data.List
import Data.Ord

import Debug.Trace

data Bit = Bit { index :: Integer, body :: String }

readBit fn =
  withFile fn ReadMode $ \h -> Bit <$> (hGetLine h >>= return . read)
<*> readBody
  where readBody = trace "In readBody"
                   $ withFile fn ReadMode
                     $ \h -> do b <- hGetContents h
                                let b' = foldr (\e a -> seq e (a ++ [e])) [] b
                                seq b' $ return $ trace ("Read body
from: " ++ fn) b'

main = do bl <- mapM readBit ["file1.txt","file2.txt"]
          mapM_ (putStrLn . show . index) $ sortBy (comparing index) bl
          putStrLn $ body $ head bl
----

Two points:

1 - I had to cut off file1.txt to be just above 1024 bytes otherwise
the program becomes extremely slow even on a 100KB file with a line
being output every 5 seconds and with my CPU being completely busy
(I'm using a modern MacBook Pro).

2 - Omitting the last line in my program actually causes the body to
be completely read even if it's not used: this is consistent with my
hypotesis on seq which now works properly.

:)

Cristiano