[Haskell-cafe] Re: Fwd: Semantics of iteratees, enumerators, enumeratees?

Jason Dagit dagit at codersbase.com
Tue Aug 24 01:47:49 EDT 2010


On Mon, Aug 23, 2010 at 10:37 PM, Conrad Parker <conrad at metadecks.org>wrote:

> On 24 August 2010 14:14, Jason Dagit <dagit at codersbase.com> wrote:
> > I'm not a semanticist, so I apologize right now if I say something stupid
> or
> > incorrect.
> >
> > On Mon, Aug 23, 2010 at 9:57 PM, Conal Elliott <conal at conal.net> wrote:
> >>>
> >>> So perhaps this could be a reasonable semantics?
> >>>
> >>> Iteratee a = [Char] -> Maybe (a, [Char])
> >>
> >> I've been tinkering with this model as well.
> >>
> >> However, it doesn't really correspond to the iteratee interfaces I've
> >> seen, since those interfaces allow an iteratee to notice size and number
> of
> >> chunks.  I suspect this ability is an accidental abstraction leak, which
> >> raises the question of how to patch the leak.
> >
> > From a purely practical viewpoint I feel that treating the chunking as an
> > abstraction leak might be missing the point.  If you said, you wanted the
> > semantics to acknowledge the chunking but be invariant under the size or
> > number of the chunks then I would be happier.
>
> I think that's the point, ie. to specify what the invariants should
> be. For example (to paraphrase, very poorly, something Conal wrote on
> the whiteboard behind me):
>
> run [concat [chunk]] == run [chunk]
>
> ie. the (a, [Char]) you maybe get from running an iteratee over any
> partitioning of chunks should be the same, ie. the same as from
> running it over the concatenation of all chunks, which is the whole
> input [Char].
>

I find this notation foreign.  I get [Char], that's the Haskell String
type, but what is [chunk]?  I doubt you mean a list of one element.


>
> > I use iteratees when I need to be explicit about chunking and when I
> don't
> > want the resources to "leak outside" of the stream processing.  If you
> took
> > those properties away, I wouldn't want to use it anymore because then it
> > would just be an inelegant way to do things.
>
> Then I suppose the model for Enumerators is different than that for
> Iteratees; part of the point of an Enumerator is to control the size
> of the chunks, so that needs to be part of the model. An Iteratee, on
> the other hand, should not have to know the size of its chunks. So you
> don't want to be able to know the length of a chunk (ie. a part of the
> stream), but you do want to be able to, say, fold over it, and to be
> able to stop the computation at any time (these being the main point
> of iteratees ...).
>

I think I agree with that.

Jason
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