[Haskell-cafe] Do you recognize this type?

[Chris Warburton]

Corentin Dupont <corentin.dupont at gmail.com> writes:

> Nobody on that?
> What I really want is: a computation that can be interrupted if enough
> result is already there.
> I would be surprise if that concept doesn't exist already somewhere :)

I'd be surprised if this can be done with Applicative without some
hackery.

Very roughly, we can think of Functors as one-shot actions. For example,
the IO instance of Functor lets us perform exactly 1 side-effect; all we
can do with the result is map pure functions over it.

Applicatives are a static chain of actions. For example, the IO instance
of Applicative lets us chain together any number of side-effecting
actions, but those actions can't alter the chain itself.

Monads are a dynamic chain of actions. They're like Applicatives, but
each action can choose which action to perform next based on the
previous results.

>From this perspective, the "shortcut" you're looking for requires the
ability to choose the next action (count another vote or finish
prematurely) based on the previous results (the running total). That's
what Monads are good for, but Applicatives can't do it by themselves.

There's probably an unsafe* way to do this, which will in fact be safe
due to your voting invariant ("if there aren't enough uncounted votes
to change the outcome, the outcome cannot change"). Maybe someone who's
performed similar optimisations can help.

Good luck!

Chris