[Haskell-cafe] MonadCatchIO-transformers and ContT

[David Menendez]

On Mon, Jun 21, 2010 at 7:04 AM, Neil Brown <nccb2 at kent.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> Here's my speculation, based on glancing at the libraries involved: I
> believe the reason for this may be the MonadCatchIO instance for ContT:
>
> ===
> instance MonadCatchIO m => MonadCatchIO (ContT r m) where
>   m `catch` f = ContT $ \c -> runContT m c `catch` \e -> runContT (f e) c
> ===
>
> To my eye, that code takes the continuation to run after the block, c (which
> in your case involves the after-action from bracket_, and then the error),
> and runs that inside the catch block.  This causes a successful completion
> of bracket_ (first release), followed by the error, which triggers the catch
> block which then runs the final actions (second release) and rethrows the
> error.  Does that sound possible to anyone else?

Sounds possible to me.

ContT does not play well with control operations from other monads.
Most people would expect, e.g., lift m `catch` lift . f = lift (m
`catch` f), but ContT does not have such an operation.

If you really want explicit continuations and exceptions, you need a
monad written specifically for that.

-- 
Dave Menendez <dave at zednenem.com>
<http://www.eyrie.org/~zednenem/>