Jason Dagit wrote:
From a purely practical viewpoint I feel that treating the chunking as an abstraction leak might be missing the point. If you said, you wanted the semantics to acknowledge the chunking but be invariant under the size or number of the chunks then I would be happier.
I use iteratees when I need to be explicit about chunking and when I don't want the resources to "leak outside" of the stream processing. If you took those properties away, I wouldn't want to use it anymore because then it would just be an inelegant way to do things.
I'm curious, can you give an example where you want to be explicit about chunking? I have a hard time imagining an example where chunking is beneficial compared to getting each character in sequence. Chunking seems to be common in C for reasons of performance, but how does that apply to Haskell? On the matter of leaking resources outside the stream processing, Iteratee does not give you any guarantees, it's only a stylistic aid (which can be powerful, of course). For instance, the following Iteratee returns the whole stream as a list: getStream :: Iteratee e a m [a] getStream = Iteratee . return . Continue $ go [] where go xs EOF = Yield xs EOF go xs (Chunk ys) = Continue $ go (xs++ys) (using the API from http://ianen.org/articles/understanding-iteratees/ ) Regards, Heinrich Apfelmus -- http://apfelmus.nfshost.com