[Haskell-cafe] Iteratee rest and monad instance

[Bas van Dijk]

On Sat, Jun 12, 2010 at 1:12 PM, Tilo Wiklund <noteventime at gmail.com> wrote:
> I am probably missing something obvious or something relating to
> optimisation/server software but defining iteratees as "Iteratee s a =
> Cont (s -> Either (s, a) (Iteratee s a))" seems to lead to a more
> natural monad instance, and does not suffer from (what seems to me to
> be an issue) having to make predictions about the stream it will be
> passed.

If you forget about the monad transformer, your iteratee is
essentially the same as the current iteratee in the iteratee
package[1]:

newtype IterateeG c el m a = IterateeG{
  runIter :: StreamG c el -> m (IterGV c el m a)
  }
data IterGV c el m a =
  Done a (StreamG c el)
  | Cont (IterateeG c el m a) (Maybe ErrMsg)

So a function from a stream to a result which is either done or needs more data.

The current iteratee design from Oleg Kiselyov[2] is slightly different however:

data Iteratee a = IE_done a Stream
		| IE_cont (Stream -> Iteratee a) (Maybe ErrMsg)

The main advantage of this design is that you can create an iteratee
which returns a value without consuming input:

return x = IE_done x (Chunk "")

instead of:

return x = IterateeG (\s -> return $ Done x s)

You may also want to read the latest issue of The Monad Reader[3]
(issue 16) which contains an article by John W. Lato (author of the
iteratee package) which introduces iteratees.

[1] http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/iteratee/0.3.5/doc/html/Data-Iteratee-Base.html#t%3AIterGV
[2] http://okmij.org/ftp/Haskell/Iteratee/Iteratee.hs
[3] http://themonadreader.wordpress.com/2010/05/12/issue-16/