[Haskell-cafe] Lifting an enumerator

[John Millikin]

The type signature

    liftEnum :: (Monad m, MonadTrans t) => Enumerator a m b ->
Enumerator a (t m) b

expands to:

    liftEnum :: (Monad m, MonadTrans t) => (Step a m b -> Iteratee a m
b) -> Step a (t m) b -> Iteratee a (t m) b

So you could implement it iff you can define:

    lower :: (Monad m, MonadTrans t) => t m a -> m a

Which is not possible given the standard MonadTrans, but maybe
possible with a custom restricted typeclass such as your
MonadTransControl.

On Wed, Aug 24, 2011 at 07:02, Michael Snoyman <michael at snoyman.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Max asked earlier[1] how to create a new instance of a class in
> Persistent using a monad transformer. Without getting into the
> specific details of persistent, I wanted to pose a question based on a
> much more general question: how can we lift the inner monad of an
> enumerator? We can easily do so for an Iteratee[2], but there is
> nothing to allow it for an Enumerator.
>
> At first glance, this problem looks very similar to the shortcomings
> of MonadIO when dealing with callbacks. In that case, you cannot use
> liftIO on a function that takes an `IO a` as a parameter. A solution
> to this issue is monad-control[3], which can be used to allow
> exception catching, memory allocation, etc.
>
> So I'm wondering: can we come up with a similar solution to this issue
> with enumerators? I have a working solution for the specific case of
> the ErrorT monad[4], but it would be great to be able to generalize
> it. Bonus points if we could express this in terms of the typeclasses
> already provided by monad-control.
>
> Michael
>
> [1] http://groups.google.com/group/yesodweb/browse_thread/thread/be2a77217a7f3343
> [2] http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/enumerator/0.4.14/doc/html/Data-Enumerator.html#v:liftTrans
> [3] http://hackage.haskell.org/package/monad-control
> [4] https://gist.github.com/1168128
>