[Haskell-cafe] ANNOUNCE: New versions of ALL the monadic regions packages

[Bas van Dijk]

On Thu, Jan 7, 2010 at 5:15 PM, Felipe Lessa <felipe.lessa at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 07, 2010 at 04:00:31PM +0100, Bas van Dijk wrote:
>> As I explained in my announcement of 'safer-file-handles', I
>> discovered a serious lack of expressive power in my 'regions' package.
>> I have now solved that problem in the way I envisaged by removing the
>> 'resource' parameter from 'RegionT' and using existential
>> quantification to bring the 'resource' type back at the place I need
>> it but hidden from the outside.
>
> But if I understand correctly, now you can't know from the type
> signature what kind of resource a given code accesses.  Isn't
> this a drawback?  Wouldn't it be better to write something like
>
>  TopRegion (File `And` Network)
>
> to tell something needs both?

Oh yes, very good point!

Lets think, I could parameterize RegionT by some sort of heterogeneous
list (HList) that encodes all the resources that the region opens.
However won't this introduce my previous problem again?

Another solution might be to encode the resources that a region opens
as constraints. I think 'control-monad-exception' uses a similar
technique to encode all the exceptions that a monadic computation may
throw.

My previous program could then possibly be written as something like:

openBoth ∷ ( resources `Contains` Device
           , resources `Contains` File
           )
         ⇒ Device → FilePath → RegionT resources pr ()
openBoth usbDevice filePath = do
 h1 ← open usbDevice
 h2 ← openFile filePath ReadMode
 return ()

Thanks for bringing up this point!

Bas

[1] http://hackage.haskell.org/package/control-monad-exception