Non-monolithic version of 'sequence' for IO monad?
Malcolm Wallace
Malcolm.Wallace@cs.york.ac.uk
Tue, 6 Nov 2001 10:39:39 +0000
> Is there any way, short of using unsafePerformIO,
> to implement a combinator
> f :: [IO a] -> IO [a]
> in a way that the the result is produced lazily?
>
> The problem with
> sequence :: (Monad m) => [m a] -> m [a]
> sequence = foldr (liftM2 (:)) (return []) where
> liftM2 f a b = do { a' <- a; b' <- b; return (f a' b') }
> is that it consumes the entire input before producing a result.
Are you *really* sure that the latter consumes its entire input
before producing any result? It looks pretty lazy to me, and I seem
to be able to give it an infinite list of computations and yet start
receiving results immediately....
Regards,
Malcolm