On Monday 25 June 2007, Michael T. Richter wrote:

On Mon, 2007-25-06 at 01:05 -0500, Jon Cast wrote:

...

What exactly are you trying to do?

I'm trying to model a transactional system which could fail mid-transaction without an easy rollback on conditions which could be checked in advance.

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Now if I could just check permissions on each operation the monad emerging is clearer. Each call in the do block to C, then D and finally E would be individually checked for permissions in the Monad before the next step could progress. I can do this. But if I want to change the model to pre-check the privileges (because of performance issues or because of resource allocation issues or whatever) I see no easy way to do the same thing. This intrigues me.

Why? There's no easy or simple way to tell what operations you're going to execute in advance. Take a concrete example: do s <- readFile "/etc/ourProg" let Right xn = flip parse s $ many $ fileName flip mapM xn $ \ filename -> readFile xn Now, you can't possible pre-check this for permissions, because the argument to readFile in the fourth line is drawn from an external file; you would have to check for permission to read every file in the world. If your particular permissions issues are indeed independent of the arguments to performB, you can use an arrow: data MyArrow alpha beta = MyArrow (IO Bool) (alpha -> IO beta) instance Arrow MyArrow where arr f = MyArrow (return True) (return . f) MyArrow c0 a0 >>> MyArrow c1 a1 = MyArrow (liftM2 (&&) c0 c1) (\ x -> a0 x >>= a1) Then you can check the pre-conditions beforehand. (If you want to see why using an arrow helps, try implementing an instance of the class class Arrow a => ArrowApply a where apply :: a (a alpha beta, alpha) beta for MyArrow. Can't be done, but apply is built in to monads). Sincerely, Jonathan Cast http://sourceforge.net/projects/fid-core http://sourceforge.net/projects/fid-emacs