[Haskell-cafe] External Interfaces

[Sanket Agrawal]

If the function that you are calling doesn't modify the value you are
passing, and only returns a value, without any additional side-effects,
such as printing to output, or modifying another memory value visible to
Haskell code, then yes, I think you can skip IO layer. In other words, any
mutations that are carried out by C function must not be visible to the
calling code. That is the criteria I use when deciding whether to use IO
wrapper or not, for C FFI functions.

For example, FFI signature for sin function in GNU C math.h can be declared
without IO wrapper. The sin function has a hidden internal state but it is
not visible to the calling code. It may acquire its own memory, do
something with it, and release it after it is done, but as long as it
doesn't touch the region of memory owned by Haskell code, or
deterministically communicate with it in anyway other than the return
value, its state can be considered hidden. Printing to output is a form of
communication.


On Sat, Mar 3, 2012 at 1:24 PM, Victor Miller <victorsmiller at gmail.com>wrote:

> I'd like to write reasonable Haskell interfaces to a few external
> libraries.  To be specific -- all of them do limited calculations (no
> I/O) but each has an internal state.  I know that I can have results
> dump everything into the IO monad, but I'd like to avoid the "sin bin"
> (I think it was Phil Wadler who called it that).  To be specific, I
> have in mind the library pari ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PARI/GP )
> which does symbolic algebra calculations.  The way that the pari state
> works is that state of works is that we can add definitions of new
> quantities, and bind them to a calculated value.  As part of the state
> there might be certain cached calculations.  If I avoid deleting bound
> objects, it seems to me that it would be perfectly valid to make the
> interface into a monad have a complicated state which is being managed
> by the pari library.  As long as any queries from pari give the same
> value (which should be the case if I never delete anything) then it
> should be valid without dumping things into the IO monad.  Does anyone
> see anything wrong with my reasoning?
>
> Victor
>
> _______________________________________________
> Haskell-Cafe mailing list
> Haskell-Cafe at haskell.org
> http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/attachments/20120303/d84d9ebc/attachment.htm>