[Haskell] Re: Using unsafePerformIO safely

[Hector Guilarte]

Sorry, I just realized I sent the e-mail to the wrong mailing list. My bad!

On Thu, Jun 25, 2009 at 5:55 PM, Hector Guilarte <hectorg87 at gmail.com>wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I made a GCL compiler using Alex and Happy and now I'm making the
> interpreter to that program. Here's the deal:
>
> First of all, I'm no expert in the usage of monads. Now:
>
> Whenever a "show" instruction is found in any GCL program while the
> interpretation is being done it is supposed to print on the stdout the
> string or the aritmetic expresion it was called with, so I guessed I need to
> run an IO operation and continue the interpretation of my program. I managed
> to do this using unsafePerformIO and `seq` like is shown below. My question
> is: Is it safe to use it this way? So far it is working great, but I need to
> be sure I'm using it in a "safe" way. Like I said, I'm no expert in monads
> and the System.IO.Unsafe documentation says:
>
> "
> *unsafePerformIO* :: IO<http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/html/libraries/base/System-IO.html#t%3AIO>a -> a
> This is the "back door" into the IO<http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/html/libraries/base/System-IO.html#t%3AIO>monad, allowing
> IO<http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/html/libraries/base/System-IO.html#t%3AIO>computation to be performed at any time. For this to be safe, the
> IO<http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/html/libraries/base/System-IO.html#t%3AIO>computation should be free of side effects and independent of its
> environment.
> "
>
> I don't know if the IO computation I'm doing is free of side effects and
> independent of its enviroment :s. (is just hPutStr stdout ....)
>
> Also I've read something about my code not being executed for sure or
> something like that. Can somebody check the code and tell me if I'm "safe"
> with it?
>
> Thanks a lot!
>
> Here's the code:
>
> -- Tabla is my Symbol Table of the program being interpreted
> evalInstruccion:: Instruccion -> Tabla -> Tabla
> evalInstruccion (ShowY showY) tabla = myRunIO (evalShow showY tabla)
> evalInstruccion _ tabla = tabla      -- There are many other Instructions
> here missing wich are not relevant to my question
>
> {-# NOINLINE myRunIO #-}
> myRunIO:: (Tabla, IO()) -> Tabla
> myRunIO tupla = ((unsafePerformIO (snd tupla)) `seq` (fst tupla)) -- Here's
> the unsafePerformIO.... Am I safe?
>
> evalShow:: ShowY -> Tabla -> (Tabla, IO())
> evalShow (ShowS string) tabla = (tabla,(hPutStr stdout string))
> evalShow (ShowE expr) tabla = (tabla,(hPutStr stdout (show (evalExpr expr
> tabla)))) -- Don't worry about evalExpr, it works and returns an Int
>
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