Michael, The package Workflow has persistent timeouts (can wait for years and restart on system failure if embedded in the workflow monad, although it can run in the IO monad, with no recovery). They are composable with any action in the STM monad with orElse: flag <- getTimeoutFlag $ 5*24*60 * 60 -- wait exactly 5 days. even -- if the program restart ap <- step . atomically $ readSomewhere >> return False `orElse` waitUntilSTM flag >> return True case ap of False -> print "something received" True -> print "timeout" step" lift it from the IO to the workflow monad, and gives it persistence and recovery. without "step", it runs in the IO monad (No recovery on system failure): flag <- transientTimeout $ 5*24*60 * 60 -- wait 5 days, timeout -- restarts in case of failure ap <- atomically $ readSomewhere >> return False `orElse` waitUntilSTM flag >> return True case ap of False -> print "something received" True -> print "timeout" ------ transientTimeout t= do flag <- atomically $ newTVar False forkIO $ threadDelay(t * 1000000) >> atomically (writeTVar flag True) >> myThreadId >>= killThread return flag 2010/10/14 Michael Snoyman :

Hey all,

Is there a library that supports fuzzy time deltas? For example, given two UTCTimes (or something like that) it could produce:

43 seconds 13 minutes 17 hours 4 days 8 months

I want to use it for the news feature on Haskellers. It's not that hard to write, just wondering if it's already been done.

Michael _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe