Hi Josef, Josef Svenningsson wrote:
...the fun doesn't end there. There are other strictness properties to consider.
Could be. But after using mtl heavily for a few years now, I find that in practice the only one where have felt the need for control over strictness is >>=, like Dean's example.
Take the state monad for example. Should it be strict or lazy in the state that it carries around? What about the value component? I think the answer to these questions are the same as for monadic strictness above: both strict and lazy variants are useful.
Are those really needed? Can't the strictness of the state be fully controlled by seq with runState, get, and put, and by choosing lazy or strict >>=? And similarly with value? As opposed to >>=, where there is no way to control its strictness from outside the Monad instance declaration.
Now, the challenge here is to design a library which doesn't explode in size from all the various possibilities for strictness or laziness.
The same challenge exists in many of the Data.* libraries. I think this is very important.
In fact I did once bite the bullet and came up with a library that does all this. Though I haven't released it publicly yet. I never took the time to polish the code to the point where I wouldn't be embarrassed about showing it to others. If you kick me hard enough I might release the library.
My boot is not long enough :). But I would love to see what you did. Regards, Yitz