[Haskell-cafe] ANNOUNCE: pipes-core 0.0.1

[Chris Smith]

On Sun, Mar 11, 2012 at 2:33 PM, Twan van Laarhoven <twanvl at gmail.com> wrote:
> I think you should instead move unwaits in and out of the composition on the
> left side:
>
>    unawait x >> (p1 >+> p2) === (unawait x >> p1) >+> p2
>
> This makes idP a left-identity for (>+>), but not a right-identity, since
> you can't move unawaits in and out of p2.

Not sure how we got to the point of debating which of the category
laws pipes should break... messy business there.  I'm going to be in
favor of not breaking the laws at all.  The problem here is that
composition of chunked pipes requires agreement on the chunk type,
which gives the type-level guarantees you need that all chunked pipes
in a horizontal composition (by which I mean composition in the
category... I think you were calling that vertical?  no matter...)
share the same chunk type.  Paolo's pipes-extra does this by inventing
a newtype for chunked pipes, in which the input type appears in the
result as well.  There are probably some details to quibble with, but
I think the idea there is correct.  I don't like this idea of
implicitly just throwing away perfectly good data because the types
are wrong.  It shows up in the category-theoretic properties of the
package as a result, but it also shows up in the fact that you're
*throwing* *away* perfectly good data just because the type system
doesn't give you a place to put it!  What's become obvious from this
is that a (ChunkedPipe a b m r) can NOT be modelled correctly as a
(Pipe a b m r).

-- 
Chris Smith