[Haskell-cafe] Re: MonadCatchIO, finally and the error monad

[Antoine Latter]

On Thu, Oct 14, 2010 at 7:15 AM, Michael Snoyman <michael at snoyman.com> wrote:
> By the way, here is how I would implement the ErrorT MonadCatchIO instance:
>
> instance (MonadCatchIO m, Error e) => MonadCatchIO (ErrorT e m) where
>  m `catch` f   = mapErrorT (\m' -> m' `catch` \e -> runErrorT $ f e) m
>  block         = mapErrorT block
>  unblock       = mapErrorT unblock
>  bracket before after thing = block $ do
>    a <- before
>    unblock $ thing a `finally` after a
>  bracket_ before after thing = block $ do
>    _ <- before
>    unblock $ thing `finally` after
>  finally thing after = mapErrorT (`finally` runErrorT after) thing
>
> By using "finally" inside of the definitions of bracket, bracket_ and
> finally, we can ensure that if there is any "special" monad underneath
> our ErrorT, the cleanup function will still run.
>
> Michael
>

A while back I wrote a small package built on MonadCatchIO to give the
equivalent of alloca and the like[1].

I haven't used it much because I couldn't convince myself that the
resources would eventually be freed in a monad with non-standard
control flow (such as the continuation based iteratee-0.4[2]).

Antoine

[1] http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/MonadCatchIO-mtl-foreign/0.1/doc/html/Control-Monad-CatchIO-Foreign.html

[2] http://hackage.haskell.org/package/iteratee