- Haskell-Cafe - Haskell.org

state of FRP
by Isaac Jones 09 Apr '03

09 Apr '03

Greetings, I'm interested in learning more about Functional Reactive Programming since I want to be a better designer of Haskell programs. I don't want to use it for animation or GUIs in particular, but as a general design paradigm. With some digging, one discovers www.haskell.org/frp which has some pointers to papers on frp, but each of them seems to describe something new or domain specific wrt frp. I'd love advice about what order to read these papers in. Is there any more general introduction to frp for a working programmer? In learning Monads, I found standard libraries like Control.Monad.State to be extremely instructive since they encapsulate the basic operations that are available. (I wrote some documentation for this module a few weeks back to share what I learned. Its in CVS now.) So I'm curious about frp libraries. haskell.org/frp mentions an frp library that will exist one day. The manual looks interesting and this seems like it would be a good place to start, but Yale FRP is, alas, not yet available. Further poking reveals www.haskell.org/afrp which has an available snapshot, but no documentation. Any advice out there on how to go about learning frp? Should I see what I can glean from using functional reactive animation or GUI libraries? peace, isaac

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IOHCC Results?
by Ashley Yakeley 06 Apr '03

06 Apr '03

Anyone know? I didn't submit anything but I am curious... http://iohc.mgoetze.net/ -- Ashley Yakeley, Seattle WA

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comonads, io
by peter＠premise.demon.co.uk 06 Apr '03

06 Apr '03

I came across an interesting paper "Codata and comonads in Haskell" by Richard Kieburtz, and some other work by Alberto Pardo on comonads. Kieburtz proposes an OI comonad, as an alternative to (or something alongside?) the IO monad. Just for reasons of symmetry, it's natural to wonder if they aren't as pervasive in functional programs as monads. Frustratingly, I can't seem to grasp the intuition. I'm aware that the state-monad s->(s,a) has a dual state-in-context comonad (s,s->a). How does the side-effect manifest itself? The (ineffective) hints the authors give revolve around the idea that side-effects "derive" from the context of a program. Any other hints? Are comonads especially appropriate for programming systems that react to changes in their environment? Is an object of OI type something like a program to react to events? I can't make the slightest sense of Kieburtz's OI co-monad, with commands like coGetChar :: OI Handle -> Char. Peter Hancock

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creating MIME mail
by David Roundy 05 Apr '03

05 Apr '03

Any ideas how to easily create MIME mail? A brief look at haskell.org didn't show any libraries that seemed useful for this. Basically I'd like to send information from my program (in the form of a couple of attachments to an email) which can then be extracted on the other end. So I guess I'd like to be able to both create _and_ parse MIME email. The reason for it being email is so the receiver can easily check it out before piping it into my program. -- David Roundy http://www.abridgegame.org

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RE: simulating dynamic dispatch
by Simon Peyton-Jones 04 Apr '03

04 Apr '03

(Taking this off to haskell-cafe) It's not unreasonable for it to be ambiguous. The argument 'f' says *forall b*. The cast will cast to a *specified* type. But you aren't specifying the type. If you passed a less polymorphic 'f' it might be ok. Simon | -----Original Message----- | From: Hal Daume III [mailto:hdaume@ISI.EDU] | Sent: 21 March 2003 22:29 | To: Simon Peyton-Jones | Cc: oleg(a)pobox.com; haskell(a)haskell.org | | Excellent paper! I have started using some of the techniques already! | | But, back to the real question :). I now no longer think such a thing is | possible. Essentially what I want (given 'cast :: Typeable a, Typeable b | => a -> Maybe b' [1]), is to write something like: | | test :: forall a r . Typeable a => | (forall b . (Typeable b, Foo b) => b -> r) -> | a -> Maybe r | test f a = liftM f (cast a) | | but then 'b' is ambiguous. I'm not sure there is any way around | this. Can someone help? | | - Hal | | [1] is there any reason why parens are requires around class | contexts? i've always found this odd... | | -- | Hal Daume III | hdaume(a)isi.edu | "Arrest this man, he talks in maths." | www.isi.edu/~hdaume | | On Fri, 21 Mar 2003, Simon Peyton-Jones wrote: | | > You might also find the 'cast' function in Section 3 of "Scrap your | > boilerplate" useful. | > http://research.microsoft.com/~simonpj/papers/hmap/ | > I'm not certain, but it has the right smell. | > Simon | > | > | -----Original Message----- | > | From: oleg(a)pobox.com [mailto:oleg@pobox.com] | > | Sent: 21 March 2003 04:19 | > | To: hdaume(a)ISI.EDU; haskell(a)haskell.org | > | Subject: Re: simulating dynamic dispatch | > | | > | | > | > i'm hoping to be able to simulate a sort of dynamic dispatch based | > on | > | > class instances. | > | | > | It seems you want to dispatch based not on a type but on the | > | constraint of a type. | > | | > | You code almost worked. Here's the a bit updated and working version. | > | | > | class Foo a where { foo :: a -> Bool } | > | class Bar a where { bar :: a -> Bool } | > | | > | data FB = forall a . Foo a => MkFoo a | forall a . Bar a => MkBar a | > | | > | instance Foo FB where | > | foo (MkFoo x) = foo x | > | | > | instance Bar FB where | > | bar (MkBar x) = bar x | > | | > | -- some instances for the test | > | instance Foo Int where | > | foo x = x == 0 | > | | > | instance Bar Char where | > | bar x = x == 'a' | > | | > | | > | test x = case x of | > | (MkFoo a) -> Just $ foo a | > | (MkBar a) -> Just $ bar a | > | -- _ -> Nothing | > | | > | | > | -- *Main> test $ MkFoo (0::Int) | > | -- Just True | > | -- *Main> test $ MkFoo (10::Int) | > | -- Just False | > | -- *Main> test $ MkBar 'a' | > | -- Just True | > | -- *Main> test $ MkBar 'b' | > | -- Just False | > | | > | _______________________________________________ | > | Haskell mailing list | > | Haskell(a)haskell.org | > | http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell | >

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GISTalk - New GIS Forum!
by Tim Johnson 03 Apr '03

03 Apr '03

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Tokenizing Strings
by jamesd＠mena.org.au 02 Apr '03

02 Apr '03

I have a string that needs to be split/tokenized based on a delimiter. This can easily be accomplished using 'break' if the delimiter is only 1 character (i.e. break isSpace "this is a string"), but I can't see any way of using this for a delimiter with multiple characters. in this case, I have a string containing multiples fields seperated by *two* blank lines (\n\n). I can't just break on the newline character, as single newline characters can be found inside each field. any idea how I can do this without too much hassle? -James (jamesd(a)mena.org.au)

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how to use POSIX function utime?
by David Roundy 28 Mar '03

28 Mar '03

I'm trying to figure out how to use the POSIX function utime. I'm pretty much stumped at the moment, largely because I can't figure out how to do anything useful with ClockTime variables. I can't see any way to make use of GHC.Posix.utime, as it gives a binding to the utime function, but the argument is of type Ptr (), and I can't see how to make this to a pointer to the contents of a pair of ClockTimes. I had thought that I could just write my own utime wrapper in C, but I'm still stumped on getting anything out of a ClockTime! The problem is that I would like my code to be portable, so I can't assume a ClockTime is a UInt32 (or that a time_t is a 32 bit int). Any ideas how I can get around this? The only idea I have at the moment is to define a MyClockTime which is always a UInt64 and then do in my C wrapper I could cast back and forth from time_t to an int64 type. Ugh. -- David Roundy http://www.abridgegame.org

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Re: how to track down infinite loop?
by David Roundy 26 Mar '03

26 Mar '03

On Wed, Mar 26, 2003 at 07:40:30AM -0800, Andy Moran wrote: > On Wednesday 26 March 2003 07:23 am, David Roundy wrote: > > I would try using Debug.Trace.trace. It takes a string and an expression, > and returns the expressions while outputting the string to stderr (I > think). You can choose your own mnemonics to prevent the truncation > problem. Thanks for the hint! I like trace, strongly reminiscent of the good old technique of sprinkling printfs around. :) It turned out the problem was running sequence on an infinite list of type [Maybe a]. In retrospect obvious, but sort of hard to notice (especially since the infinite list is created in a different module from the sequence call. Fortunately, in this case it is safe to just truncate the list to some large size (since the function in question is only used in the quickChecking code, and not in the actual code). -- David Roundy http://civet.berkeley.edu/droundy/

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how to track down infinite loop?
by David Roundy 26 Mar '03

26 Mar '03

Hello. I've got an infinite loop (I think) which I recently introduced to my code (the visible symptom is stack space overflow), and am wondering if there is an easier way to figure out where it might be. The problem being that I've made a rather large number of changes (all of which are mutually dependent). In the past, I've used ghc's heap profiling to track this sort of thing down, as I can pretty easily trace from that what functions were called in the infinite loop. The problem I'm now having is that the string describing the call stack is truncated too much, so I can't see who the real culprit is. I know the best thing would be to go over all my changes with a fine-toothed comb, but it would be nice to have an idea where to look. Actually, it's not all that much new code, but I usually find it hard to see a bug that I've written myself... Any ideas for tricks to see where a program is looping indefinitely? I'm sure I can track down this bug pretty easily, but is seems like this is something one really ought to be able to do... -- David Roundy http://civet.berkeley.edu/droundy/

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