[Haskell-cafe] Resource module

[Arie Peterson]

On Tue, 1 Jun 2010 21:10:40 +0200, Bas van Dijk <v.dijk.bas at gmail.com>
wrote:
| [...]
| Hi Arie, I would love to see some examples of these resources for
| which you can't define a Resource[1] instance.
| [...]
| 
| [1]
|
http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/regions/0.5/doc/html/Control-Resource.html


I had this involved example of a function that takes a resource, and
returns a similar resource, which performs the relevant IO actions in a
separate thread, receiving its instructions over a concurrent channel.
However, in the course of explaining why it doesn't fit in the simple
open/Handle/close framework, I actually helped myself to see that it is
possible (and not difficult) :-).


A different scenario where the open/Handle/close framework may actually
not suffice is the following: 

> fallback :: Resource cap IO -> Resource cap IO -> Resource cap IO
> fallback (Resource primary) (Resource backup) = Resource l where
>   l c = primary c `catch` (\ ProblemWithMainResource -> backup c)

; the fact that @c@, the "continuation" (which describes how the
capability is used), is mentioned twice in the body of @l@ makes this a
weird case.


By the way, Bas, I'm not quite sure how to properly use your Resource
class. Should one create different datatypes for different resources, if
they have different handle types or open/close functions, even though they
provide the same "capability"? I would like to avoid this, if possible, to
make life easier for users of these resources (they just want a resource
providing a certain capability, and don't care about its internal state). I
suppose one can create a class of resources giving a certain capability
instead.


Kind regards,

Arie