[Haskell-cafe] ANNOUNCE: iterIO-0.1 - iteratee-based IO with pipe operators

[wren ng thornton]

On 5/6/11 11:15 AM, Alex Mason wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> I really love the look of this package, but if this is going be *the* iteratee package, I would absolutely love to see it fix some of the biggest mistakes in the other iteratee packages, soecifically naming. A change in naming for the terms iteratee, enumerator and enumeratee would go a hell of a long way here; Peaker on #haskell suggested Consumer/Producer/Transformer, and there is a lot of agreement in the channel that these are vastly better names. They’re also far less intimidating to users.
>
> I personally feel that maybe Transformer isn't such a great name (being closely associated with monad transformers), and that maybe something like Mapper would be better, but I'm by no means in love with that name either. More people in #haskell seem to like Transformer, and I don't think my argument against it is very strong, so the hivemind seems to have settled on the Producer/Transformer/Consumer trilogy.

I believe "transducer" is the proper term. (Of course, producers and 
consumers are both special cases of transducers, trivializing the input 
or output stream, respectively.)

Though, IMO, I don't find the names "producer" and "consumer" 
enlightening as to why this particular pattern of iteration/enumeration 
is different from the conventional pattern found in OOP's iterators. Any 
time you have a bunch of things being created and passed around you have 
producers and consumers; the terminology is insufficient to define the 
pattern. The shift from "iterator" to "enumerator" helps to capture that 
difference. Given as there's no common name for the code calling an 
iterator, it's not immediately apparent what the push-based enumerative 
version should be called; "iteratee" seems as good as any other name, 
because it expresses the duality involved in the switch from the 
iterative style.

     control  : pull,     push
     producer : iterator, enumerator
     consumer : ???,      iteratee

Of course, this pattern of names suggests that "enumeratee" should 
properly be a backformation for naming the consumer of the pull-based 
iterative pattern. But then we're still left with the problem of what 
the transducers should be called in both cases.

-- 
Live well,
~wren