newbie: running a state transformer in context of a state reader
hello, i have a parser which is a state transformer monad, and i need to implement a lookahead function, which applies a given parser but does not change the parser state. so i wrote a function which reads the state, applies the parser and restores the state (the State monad is derived from the paper "Monadic parser combinators" by Hutton/Meijer): type Parser a = State String Maybe a lookahead :: Parser a -> Parser a lookahead p = do { s <- fetch ; x <- p ; set s ; return x } now i am curious if it is possible to run the given parser (state transformer) in a context of a state reader somehow, so as the state gets preserved automatically. something that would let me omit the calls to fetch and set methods. i would appreciate any advise thanks konst
Mon, 19 Feb 2001 18:07:17 -0800, Konst Sushenko
now i am curious if it is possible to run the given parser (state transformer) in a context of a state reader somehow, so as the state gets preserved automatically. something that would let me omit the calls to fetch and set methods.
It should be possible to do something like this: lookahead:: Parser a -> Parser a lookahead p = do { s <- fetch ; lift (evalState p s) } where evalState :: Monad m => State s m a -> s -> m a lift :: Monad m => m a -> State s m a are functions which should be available or implementable in a monad transformer framework. I don't have the Hutton/Meijer's paper at hand so I don't know if they provided them and under which names. Such functions are provided e.g. in the framework provided with ghc (by Andy Gill, inspired by Mark P Jones' paper "Functional Programming with Overloading and Higher-Order Polymorphism"). This definition of lookahead uses a separate state transformer thread instead of making changes in place and undoing them later. I don't think that it could make sense to convert a state transformer to a state reader by replacing its internals, because p does want to transform the state locally; a value of type Parser a represents a state transformation. The changes must be isolated from the main parser, but they must happen in some context. -- __("< Marcin Kowalczyk * qrczak@knm.org.pl http://qrczak.ids.net.pl/ \__/ ^^ SYGNATURA ZASTÊPCZA QRCZAK
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