[Haskell-cafe] Lifting an enumerator

[Michael Snoyman]

Actually, I'm looking for a slightly different type signature. Look at
how I've implemented the special case of ErrorT:

liftEnum :: Enumerator In IO (Either OcrError Out)
         -> Enumerator In (ErrorT OcrError IO) Out

There's a slightly different value for "b", which is what keeps track
of the monadic state. This is the same trick used in MonadControlIO.
My guess is that a final type signature would be something like:

liftEnum
  :: MonadTrans t
  => (forall c. Enumerator a m c)
  -> Enumerator a (t m) b

Then the idea would be that, for each instance of MonadTrans, we would
be encoding the state within that "c".

Michael

On Wed, Aug 24, 2011 at 8:23 PM, John Millikin <jmillikin at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
>>
>