[Haskell-cafe] Re: Asynchronous exception wormholes kill modularity

[Bas van Dijk]

On Thu, Mar 25, 2010 at 11:23 PM, Simon Marlow <marlowsd at gmail.com> wrote:
>> So I'm all for deprecating 'block' in favor of 'mask'. However what do
>> we call 'unblock'? 'unmask' maybe? However when we have:
>>
>> mask $ mask $ unmask x
>>
>> and these operations have the counting nesting levels semantics,
>> asynchronous exception will not be unmasked in 'x'. However I don't
>> currently know of a nicer alternative.
>
> But that's the semantics you wanted, isn't it?  Am I missing something?

Yes I like the nesting semantics that Twan proposed.

But with regard to naming, I think the name 'unmask' is a bit
misleading because it doesn't unmask asynchronous exceptions. What it
does is remove a layer of masking so to speak. I think the names of
the functions should reflect the nesting or stacking behavior. Maybe
something like:

addMaskingLayer :: IO a -> IO a
removeMaskingLayer :: IO a -> IO a
nrOfMaskingLayers :: IO Int

However I do find those a bit long and ugly...

regards,

Bas