[Haskell-cafe] IterIO type restricted functions

[dm-list-haskell-cafe at scs.stanford.edu]

At Wed, 29 Jun 2011 10:11:26 +1000,
John Ky wrote:
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> Hi all,
> 
> From the IterIO tutorial:
> 
>     enumFile' is like enumFile above, but type restricted to data in the lazy
>     ByteString format, which is more efficient than plain Strings. (enumFile
>     supports multiple types, but in this example there is not enough
>     information for Haskell to choose one of them, so we must use enumfile' or
>     use :: to specify a type explicitly.
> 
> Which is fine, but shouldn't there also be iterHandle' and iterStream'?
> 
> Also I'm guessing the f is a typo that should be F.

Thanks, just fixed the typo in git.

I guess the logic is that these are super-easy to define in your own
code, so better not to pollute the namespace with lots of symbols.

The same logic also applies to enumFile'.  However, in testing I found
that I often wanted something like enumFile' to prototype something
quick and dirty, just to test from a file.  So I added it as a
convenience to myself.

I don't have very strong feelings either way.  If enumFile' is
inconsistent, my inclination would be to get rid of enumFile' rather
than add iterHandle' etc.  That way, if someone wants to do everything
in terms of strict byte strings, or text, or whatever, then can just
define the primed versions to be whatever data format they prefer.

I guess the reason it doesn't feel to horrible as-is is that enumFile
is already a convenience function effectively combining openFile with
enumHandle.

David