[Haskell-cafe] I'm trying to design a GUI library -- a design question

[Ömer Sinan Ağacan]

Hi all,

I'm designing a ncurses based GUI library.

I'm calling smallest GUI elements "widgets".

A widget can have internal state of any type. Let's call this type
`s`. I want to be able to have something like this:

> data Widget s = Widget
>    { handleKey :: Key -> s -> s
>    , draw :: Int -> Int -> Int -> Int -> IO ()
>    , getFocus :: s -> s
>    , loseFocus :: s -> s
>    -- more methods may be added in the future
>    }

I also want to be able to have container types like this:

> data Container = Container [Widget s]

but obviously this does not work because widgets may have different
types of states.

So problem I'm trying to solve here is that I should somehow abstract
internal state used in a Widget but still be able to keep track of
that state so that I can pass it to methods in sequential invocations
of that methods.

Also, once I have a container like this, updating widget states would
become a problem. I'd have to somehow keep all those states like:

> data Container = Container [Widget] [WidgetState]

or

> data Container = Container [(Widget, WidgetState)]

and then manually pass state to widgets when calling methods, and
update the list using return values of methods.

In a sense I'm like trying to emulate something like closures with
mutable closed-over data in impure languages.

I think one way to have a similar effect is to use closures with
closed-over IORefs. Then I could modify that state but then I'd need
to have methods with types `IO ()`. I want to have more "precise"
types. i.e. IO is a lot more general than what I'd like to have as my
widget methods. (side effect of a widget should be limited with
changes in it's internal state)

Sorry for badly organized post, I'm a bit tired right now and I hope
my points are clear. I'm trying to figure out Haskell way of doing
something like this, without going into IO world. Ideas/suggestions
would be appreciated.

Thanks,


---
Ömer Sinan Ağacan
http://osa1.net