Comparing [Fun]Ptrs

John Meacham john@repetae.net
Tue, 4 Mar 2003 08:11:57 -0800


this is actually something similar to what I was thinking about the
other day, we have lots of classes which allow generically CREATING
empty values:
Monad: fail
MonadPlus: mzero
Monoid: mempty

but no class which allows generic examination of types with empty values
how about something like

class Empty a where
	isEmpty :: a -> Bool

or perhaps 'Void' instead of 'Empty'...
there are probably lots of types which can usefully be made instances of
Empty... Maybe, *Ptr, [], Bool, Either, many combinator type libraries
such as pretty printers...

perhaps this should be added alongside Monoid?

also, does Monad, MonadPlus and Monoid seem like they can be cleaned up
some? it seems that they should be able to share their common
form somehow... perhaps not...

	John 

On Tue, Mar 04, 2003 at 11:35:16AM +0100, Volker Stolz wrote:
> Hi, I'm looking for a way of comparing Ptrs to null *elegantly*.
> The FFI distinguishes between 'Ptr a' and 'FunPtr a', so testing
> would mean writing ((==) null[Fun]Ptr). This is rather tedious and a predicate
> 'isNull' might be in order so that it's possible to write
> 
>    when (isNull p) $ ...
> or
>    throwIOErrorIf isNull ...
> , especially without having to worry about comparing against the correct
> null pointer (FunPtr or Ptr). That's something where a class can help, but
> I'm not sure whether such a specialised class is desired...
> 
> I'd like to add the following class and instances/functions to Foreign.Ptr
> if nobody objects, they'd make code much more readable and concise:
> 
> class ToPtr a where
>    toPtr :: a -> Ptr b
> 
> isNull :: ToPtr a => a -> Bool
> isNull = (==) nullPtr . toPtr
> 
> The ToPtr class was suggested my Simon M. in favour of an even more specialised
> class PtrCmp which just has nullPtr :: PtrCmp a => isNull a -> Bool.
> -- 
> Volker Stolz * http://www-i2.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/stolz/ * PGP * S/MIME
> _______________________________________________
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John Meacham - California Institute of Technology, Alum. - john@foo.net
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