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RE: simpler I/O buffering [was: RE: An IO Question from a Newbie]
by Simon Marlow 16 Sep '03

16 Sep '03

> Writing a sequence of characters across the interface I'm > proposing is a > request by the writing program for those characters to appear > at their > destination "soon". Ideally, "soon" would be "immediately"; > however, the > characters' appearance may deliberately be delayed ("buffered"), for > efficiency, as long as such delay is "unobtrusive" to a human > user of the > program. Buffering timeouts would depend on the device; for > a terminal, > perhaps 50-100 ms would be appropriate. Such an interval > would tend not > to be noticeable to a human user but would be long enough to > effectively > collect, say, an entire line of output for output "in one > piece". The use > of a reasonable timeout would avoid the confusing behavior where a > newline-less prompt doesn't appear until the prompted data is entered. So, let me see if I've understood: the situation would be exactly as now, except that the buffer automatically gets flushed if it stays non-empty for more than a certain time interval. I don't think I like it: whatever time interval you choose will be too long. If you're doing communication with another program, for example, you really don't want to have the dialog stalled for 100ms doing nothing. Sure, you could insert a flush, but only a programmer knowledgeable about buffering will know to do that, or a programmer who has debugged the program in detail to find out why it is sitting idle most of the time. So, in the end the programmer still needs to know about buffering. I'd prefer it if the program didn't work at all when the flush is missing, because it tells you immediately that something is wrong. Cheers, Simon

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Fast I/O with sockets
by Peter Simons 16 Sep '03

16 Sep '03

Hi, I was wondering how to read and write from a Socket in the most performant way. According to the library documentation from GHC, 'hGetBuf' and 'hPutBuf' are the way to go. But my problem with these functions is that they expect to read exactly the number of bytes I gave them! The IO computation hGetBuf sock ptr 1024 wants to read 1024 bytes, no less. This doesn't work for me, because I need to drive an interactive line-based protocol session. I need the read operation to consume as much data as is available and then to return immediately, so that I can process the command right away. As an alternative, I looked at 'hGetLine', but this doesn't work for me either, at least not very well, because in my protocol, lines are terminated by "\r\n" -- not just "\n", like hGetLine expects it. Finally, I considered 'hGetContents', which has the nice property of returning a lazy-evaluated list of the data read from the socket. But unfortunately, I don't see how I could implement something like a "read timeout" on the socket when using this function. Any ideas, anybody? Peter

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RE: An IO Question from a Newbie
by Simon Marlow 16 Sep '03

16 Sep '03

> > But there's one significant difference between C and > Haskell, which is > > applicable in the case of Matt's program. In C, any line-buffered > > output streams are automatically flushed when a read from an > > unbuffered or line-buffered stream can't be satisfied from > its buffer. > > Interesting. I didn't know this. Maybe we should match this > behaviour, or > provide a write-string-and-flush function. It seems like this issue > is causing an undue amound of trouble. I wrote GHC's IO library, and deliberately didn't include this feature. The previous version of the library did have such a feature, specifically for stdin/stdout. Note that the report doesn't say we must do this. The reason I didn't include the feature is because I can't see a way to do it right. Flushing *all* line-buffered handles (the ANSI C way) doesn't seem right. Flushing stdout just because we read from stdin is not right, because the two streams might refer to completely different I/O objects. Perhaps we should attempt to detect when there are two streams connected to the same I/O object (file, pipe, tty, whatever) and enable the magic flushing then. But now do I have to explain to people how this works? I suppose we could take the view that extra flushing is basically harmless, so it doesn't matter that we flush a bunch of Handles more often than we need to. The advantage of the current scheme is that it is easy to understand and explain; the library doesn't try to do clever stuff behind your back. The disadvantage is that it catches people out, and it sometimes requires you to import IO in an otherwise Prelude-only program. I'm more-or-less agnostic - if there's a way to avoid catching people out without introducing too much overhead or complicated rules that we have to explain, then I'll happily implement it. Cheers, Simon

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threaded red-black tree
by Lex Stein 16 Sep '03

16 Sep '03

Hi, No one responded to my question several weeks ago about a purely functional implementation of a threaded, red-black tree. My message was sent about the same time as that flurry of silly emails about "how to respond to homework questions". Was my message not responded to because it was classified as a homework question? I assure you this is officework, not homework. I ended up porting Okasaki's red-black tree implementation; hacking it apart with a bunch of mutation for the threading of the list through the tree. However, I'm still missing a deletion function and I haven't been able to find a prototype (Okasaki's red-black tree module lacks delete). My study of the RB-tree deletion routine in CLR hasn't yet yielded an adaptation for a functional environment. Any advice would be much appreciated. Thanks, Lex -- Lex Stein http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~stein/ stein(a)eecs.harvard.edu cell: 617-233-0246

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Instance checking and phantom types
by Nick Name 16 Sep '03

16 Sep '03

Hi all, I have an example wich I don't understand: ---------------begin class C t data T = T instance C T data C t => T1 t = T1 f1 :: T1 () f1 = T1 data C t => T2 t = T2 t f2 :: T2 () f2 = T2 () ----------------end The first function, f1, is accepted both by hugs and ghc, unlike the second wich is rejected. Why does this happen? Shouldn't f1 be rejected with "no instance C ()" Thanks for help Vincenzo

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Read file problems
by Frederic BELLOC 15 Sep '03

15 Sep '03

HI, I have a recurrent probleme with function readFile and Monad : it is that i try to get a line, transform it and stock it in a list and what i want is that function return me the list. But hugs say me that in readFile my_file >>= \s -> map cons_line (lines s) readFile is a IO String type but is used here as [[Char]] type... and i don't know what to do... Ghc say me that is the lambda abstraction that fails with "map cons_line (lines s)" , he couldn't match IO against [] ! Help me please, i understand well (i hope) how Monad work but here i don't see a solution. Sorry for my poor english but i'm already a student. Thanks for all. -- C, socks and sun ;-) and haskell bugs :-(

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zlib binding providing Handle to compressed file.
by David Roundy 15 Sep '03

15 Sep '03

I've just created a binding to the gzopen function of zlib which causes it to create a Handle. The code currently only supports ReadMode and WriteMode, and hFileSize won't work properly when reading a file. In fact, pretty much nothing but plain old reading and writing will work, but such is life. Anyhow in case anyone is interested, I'm attaching the code. It creates a pipe using pipe(2) and spawns a thread to pass the data between the pipe and gzread or gzwrite. It's not pretty, but it's better than any other solution I could think of. Suggestions or criticisms are welcome. -- David Roundy http://www.abridgegame.org/darcs

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An IO Question from a Newbie
by Matt O'Connor 15 Sep '03

15 Sep '03

Hello all. I'm new to functional programming and Haskell, but have been programming in C and Java for a while. I've been going through the tutorials and whatnot on haskell.org. I've read from the Gentle Introduction to Haskell about IO and some of the other stuff and I have a question about it. main = do putStr "Type Something: " str <- getLine putStrLn ("You typed: " ++ str) When compile and run this code the "Type Something: " isn't displayed until the putStrLn. So there is no prompt. The output looks like this. s Type Something: You typed: s But if I change the putStr "Type Something: " to a putStrLn or put a \n at the end of the string it displays the text immediately (ie, when I want it to). Is there a good reason for this? Am I doing something wrong? Or do I need to call some kind of standard output flush? Thanks. Oh, I'm using ghc. Matt -- "Not everone knows Josiah Royce's definition of a liar as a man who willfully misplaces his ontological predicates, but everyone who has ever told a lie will recognize its accuracy." Ch. 94: Truth - "The Great Ideas: A Synopticon of Great Books of the Western World"

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YAHT Problem
by Mark Espinoza 14 Sep '03

14 Sep '03

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No safety in numbers
by Konrad Hinsen 14 Sep '03

14 Sep '03

I am trying to write a larger piece of code using only type constraints for all the numbers, not specific types, in order to be able to choose the precision as late as possible. This works rather well (something I can't say of many other languages), but one problem I keep running into is constants. Something I need frequently is, for example, the Boltzman constant, 0.0083144708636327096 in my unit system. I can certainly type 0.0083144708636327096 everywhere in the code and make things work, literals have the nice property of being overloaded. But for the sake of readibility, I prefer to give this beast a name and have the explicit value only once in my code. So I create a module "Constants" with something like k_B = 0.0083144708636327096 The trouble is that k_B then becomes "Double" by default (or any other type I declare it to be). And this ruins all the code where I make a reference to it, with Hugs telling me "Inferred type is not general enough" because all my "generic" types become unified with Double. The only solution I can see is to write a function "fromDouble" in analogy to "fromInteger" and put this in front of all named constants. But how could I implement such a function? I might also declare all my constants to be "Rational" and use "fromRational", but I don't know much about the "Rational" type. Do I have to worry about insufficient or compiler-dependent precision? Konrad.

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