[Haskell-cafe] RFC: only-read-or-write-vars

[vlado]

> > I wonder if this would be a place to add a function returning the pair
> > of the read and write capabilities (for the lack of a better word) of a
> > value.
> >
> > something like:
> >
> > rwPair:: v α -> (ReadOnly v α , WriteOnly v α)
> > rwPair a = (readOnly a, writeOnly a)
> >
> > sorry for the lame name, but my name game is off today.
> >
> > This particular function comes handy when playing with passing channels
> > or pointers around. It might be worth it to have a dedicated type for
> > that as well.
> 
> What would this dedicated type look like?

Something along the lines of
* a type alias:
   type ReadWrite v α = (ReadOnly v α , WriteOnly v α)

* or a data type:
   data ReadWrite v α = ReadWrite {reader:: ReadOnly v α, writer::
WriteOnly v α }

The intent is to be able to recognise the available capabilities.

Then we could write a Link type, which is the sum of all four
possibilities and allowing pattern matching on capabilities. This is
similar to links in pi-calculus. I'm not sure if a link type should be
in your library though. My gut feeling is it should be in a separate
library, which implements a trusted kernel, which guarantees linearity -
i.e ReadOnly and WriteOnly to be used only once - either shallow,
guaranteeing that the projection can be taken only once, or deep
providing guarantees for 'proper' linearity. Sorry, I digress, that is a
pet subject I've been playing with on and off. 

> BTW thanks for pointing me to pointers! Of course a Ptr is also a
> mutable variable so I've added instances for them.
Pleasure to be of help, even if it was by accident


Cheers,
Vlado