Proposal: overhaul System.Process

[David Roundy]

On Fri, May 16, 2008 at 04:13:35PM +0100, Neil Mitchell wrote:
> > createProcess :: (StdStream sin, StdStream sout, StdStream serr) =>
> >                 CreateProcess sin sout serr
> >              -> IO (Out sin, Out sout, Out serr, ProcessHandle)
> >
> > Then we could have a static guarantee that we only try to peek at
> > actually-created pipes.  I suppose this is a bit heavy infrastructure just
> > to avoid runtime checks for "Just", but in a few years (say, post
> > Haskell'...) it'd be nice to have safer instances like this.
> 
> Of course, you can already have these checks without any effort at
> all, using Catch: http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~ndm/catch/

But then you'd also have to restrict yourself to Haskell 98, right? Or at
least to a subset of ghc's extensions.  It's not nearly as nice as a
solution in the type checker, since it relies on every user of the library
running an extra tool if they want a safe interface.  Also, it does nothing
to eliminate the actual (admittedly trivial) runtime cost of the use of the
Maybe type.

Actually, though, now that I think about this, I'm curious... does this
mean you intend to teach Catch about this particular interface? Or is it
able to sneak into the source code of the library in order to infer that as
long as we pass CreatePipe for stdin, the first element of the tuple will
be a Just? I suppose it must.  Which illustrates another advantage of a
type-level solution: it allows programmers to infer the behavior of the
function from its type, rather than requiring them to look at either its
documentation or its implementation (both of which have significant
disadvantages... e.g. either of them might not correctly describe all past
and future versions of the library, while it's usually a safe assumption
that a type-level constraint will lead to a type-check error on any version
of the library that fails to satisfy said constraint).
-- 
David Roundy
Department of Physics
Oregon State University