[Haskell-cafe] Is it possible to create an instance of MonadBaseControl for PropertyM (QuickCheck)/continuations?

[Oliver Charles]

Hi

I'm working on a little experiment at the moment: using monadic
QuickCheck to test the integration of my code and the database. I see
some of my functions having properties like - given a database in this
state, selectAll should return all rows, and so on. My initial attempt
has worked nicely, and now I'm trying to test some more complicated
properties, but I'm hitting a problem with overlapping primary keys, and
this is because I'm not correctly cleaning up after each check.

The simplest solution to this is to bracket property itself, and for
that I turned to Control.Monad.Trans.Control in lifted-base, but I am
struggling to actually write an instance for
MonadBaseContol IO (PropertyM IO). It seems that PropertyM is a
continuation monad transformer:

newtype PropertyM m a =
  MkPropertyM { unPropertyM :: (a -> Gen (m Property)) -> Gen (m Property) }

Given this, is it possible to even write an instance of
MonadBaseControl? From the lifted-base documentation, it explicitly
calls out ConT as *not* having instances, so I wonder if it can't be
done. Sadly, I also lack intuition as to what MonadBaseControl really
means - I think it means 'capture the state of this monad, so later we
can go back to exactly the same state (or sequence of actions?)', but
this is very flakey.

So... is this possible, and if so how can I move forward?

Thanks for any help or advice!
- Ollie