MonadMorphIO [Re: Move MonadIO to base]

[Heinrich Apfelmus]

Anders Kaseorg wrote:
> On Wed, 14 Apr 2010, Anders Kaseorg wrote:
>> class Monad m => MonadMorphIO m where
>>     morphIO :: (forall b. (m a -> IO b) -> IO b) -> m a
> 
> I’d like to experimentally publish this on Hackage.  Here are some 
> questions, at least a few of which should ideally have answers before I do 
> so:
> 
> • Any ideas for what it should be named?  I have to admit that I picked 
> “morph” as a relatively generic word that doesn’t really mean anything.  
> I wanted to call it “wrap” but discovered that MonadWrap had been taken by 
> the monad-wrap package, which actually has a very similar goal but is 
> slightly less general (it doesn’t support ContT).

How about renaming  morph  to  liftControl  ? This makes it explicit
that the point is to lift control operators.

> • What useful functions should be wrapped with it?  Some candidates are 
> catch, block, unblock (and friends from Control.Exception), forkIO, 
> runInBoundThread, runInUnboundThread, unsafeInterleaveIO, withProgName, 
> withArgs, alloca (and friends from Foreign.Marshal), withMVar, 
> modifyMVar_, modifyMVar.  Then of course there are all the functions that 
> could be wrapped with liftIO…

I think it's best to wrap just a few functions like  catch  and  forkIO
 and then thoroughly document how to lift your own.

> • How should this relate to MonadIO?  Should MonadMorphIO eventually 
> replace MonadIO entirely?  For that matter, should MonadTransMorph replace 
> MonadTrans?

It cannot be a replacement because  MonadTransMorph  is strictly more
powerful than  MonadTrans  (same for IO): not every instance of
MonadTrans  can also be an instance of  MonadTransMorph. This is why I
suspect there could be something wrong with the ContT instance. Hard to
tell without having a clear specification of what should be right.

> • Maybe I’m thinking way too far ahead, and I should just release it now 
> and watch from a safe distance to see what happens?

A little thought can never hurt. ;)


Regards,
Heinrich Apfelmus

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