[Haskell-cafe] lazily-loaded structures

Evan Laforge qdunkan at gmail.com
Fri Jan 1 18:07:49 EST 2010


> My question is this: how do I change my program to make StringMap a
> lazily-loaded structure based on getStringMapValue without changing f?

You can't, because 'f' has a pure signature, but you want it to run
network operations, which are not pure.

You could say it's logically pure if you guarantee that no one else is
modifying the DB while your program is running, and you are willing to
completely abort on a network error, in which case there's a hack
called unsafeInterleaveIO.

However, I'm guessing no one is going to recommend actually doing
that.  The Prelude getContents function does that and it gets a lot of
flak for poor error handling, not closing the handle when you want it
to, etc.  Talking over the network will have all those same problems.

If you want to operate over a large structure and hide the fetching
part, you can look into the iteratee stuff.  Basically you would
define a function that opens a socket, passes chunks of data to a
passed in pure iteratee function, and closes the socket afterwards.
If you have a random access Map then I can't think of anything more
elegant than the standard imperative "lookup :: Key -> RemoteMap -> IO
Val" possibly with caching.  Put the reading strategy in an IO
function, and the rest of the processing in passed-in pure functions.


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