Archive for the ‘Haskell’ Category
MaybeArrow?
As I’ve found myself repeatedly writing a bit of code that looked vaguely like this:
get :: SomeArrow String (Maybe Thing)
foo :: [Thing] -> FooThing
. . .
getAToZ :: SomeArrow () (Maybe FooThing)
getAToZ = proc () ->
do m_a <- get -< “a”
m_b <- get -< “b”
. . .
m_z <- get -< “z”
returnA -<
do a <- m_a
b <- m_b
. . .
z <- m_z
return $ foo [a,b . . . z]
It seemed that there would have to be a way to automate this. So I wrote this MaybeArrow (careful, I’m still using 6.8.2 so it’s the old arrows with ‘pure’.). I know that there is already an ErrorArrow. But ErrorArrow as far as I can see requires ArrowChoice, and I’m not doing that. In the MaybeArrow, if an earlier computation throws a Nothing, then later computations are still allowed to perform side effects, although their outputs are snuffed, which is the behavior I want.
I would appreciate any constructive feedback.
If you’re wondering the use case has to do with waiting on several separate pieces of information to arrive from a server and combining them into one output message.
He Said She Said
Donald Knuth says: If people do discover nice ways to use the newfangled multithreaded machines, I would expect the discovery to come from people who routinely use literate programming.
This is called Haskell.
Little Things that Bother Me in Haskell
(++) is basically `mappend`.
(.) is basically `fmap`.
Others?
I’m told that (++) originally was `mappend`, but it was specialized to avoid confusing the newbies. I’m not going to waste bytes arguing with consensus formed before I knew the language existed, but I disagree.