[Haskell-cafe] Lifting an enumerator

[John Lato]

> Message: 17
> Date: Wed, 24 Aug 2011 17:02:49 +0300
> From: Michael Snoyman <michael at snoyman.com>
> Subject: [Haskell-cafe] Lifting an enumerator
> To: Haskell Cafe <haskell-cafe at haskell.org>
> Cc: John Millikin <jmillikin at gmail.com>
> Message-ID:
>        <CAKA2JgKF0dN4N8Ge1_q-zemLZM93bWg_FjMtbaZGzrC2Gqnq4w at mail.gmail.com>
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>
> 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.

Based upon a similar problem I worked on in the past, I suspect this
isn't possible in the general case, at least not safely.  That is, any
implementation (presuming it's possible at all) would violate the
resource guarantees enumerators typically provide (an inner MonadCont
is able to do this).

Unfortunately I don't have a proof, so I'm open to counter-examples ;-)

John L.