Unsafe hGetContents

[Nicolas Pouillard]

Excerpts from Simon Marlow's message of Mon Sep 21 11:52:41 +0200 2009:
> On 17/09/2009 13:58, Nicolas Pouillard wrote:
> > Excerpts from Florian Weimer's message of Wed Sep 16 22:17:08 +0200 2009:
> >> Are there any plans to get rid of hGetContents and the semi-closed
> >> handle state for Haskell Prime?
> >>
> >> (I call hGetContents unsafe because it adds side effects to pattern
> >> matching, stricly speaking invalidating most of the transformations
> >> which are expected to be valid in a pure language.)
> >
> > Would you consider something like [1] as an acceptable replacement?
> >
> > [1]: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/safe-lazy-io
> 
> I rater like this as a workaround for the most common practical problems 
> with lazy I/O, those of resource control.

> It doesn't address the deeper 
> concern that lazy I/O requires a particular evaluation order and is 
> therefore a bit warty as a language feature

When using safe-lazy-io we no longer rely (or a lot less) on the evaluation
order (assuming you mean the order of side-effects). Since the way of combining
the different inputs is statically chosen by user.

> - implementing lazy I/O 
> properly in GHC's parallel mutator was somewhat tricky.  I'm not of the 
> opinion that we should throw out lazy I/O, but it's still a problematic 
> area in Haskell.

Maybe the 'unsafeGetContents' feature required by a safe-lazy-io would be
less problematic, in particular it does not have to ignore exceptions.

Best regards,

-- 
Nicolas Pouillard
http://nicolaspouillard.fr