Roma'n Gonza'lez wrote

how can one compose a list of enumeratees, is it even possible?

It is possible. Composition of enumeratees is interesting because -- there are several, distinct and useful ways of doing it, -- one of the composition methods, shell-like pipelining, requires higher-rank types. Let us step back to Enumerators and Iteratees. Iteratee is a monad and composes as a monad. A list of Iteratees can be fused into a single Iteratee using the ordinary Control.Monad.sequence (or sequence_). Enumerator, an iteratee transformer, is a function of the type Iteratee el m a -> m (Iteratee el m a) which fits the patters (t -> m t) for some monad m. Enumerators thus compose as ordinary `monadic functions' using Kleisli composition:

(>>>) :: Monad m => (a -> m b) -> (b -> m c) -> (a -> m c) f >>> g = \x -> f x >>= g

(the operator (>>>) is defined in Control.Category). A list of enumerators is composed with foldl1 (>>>), which is the same as foldr1 (>>>) since (>>>) is associative. As a running example of the list of enumeratees to compose we take

takes = [take 2, take 3, take 4]

Granted, the example is a bit contrived: normally we want to compose a variety of enumeratees rather than the single take. On the other hand, `take n' makes a neater example. Enumeratees are enumerators, and so compose as enumerators, through Kleisli composition:

c1 :: Monad m => Enumeratee el el m a c1 = foldl1 (>>>) takes

Composing enumerators `concatenates' their sources. Therefore, c1 is equivalent to take (2+3+4):

c1r = runIdentity $ run =<< run =<< enum_pure_1chunk [1..15] (c1 stream2list) -- [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9]

If e_j is an enumeratee and i is an iteratee (for the inner stream), (e_i i) is an iteratee for the outer stream. We may use various iteratee compositions to compose (e_j i). For example, we use sequential composition

c2s :: Monad m => Iteratee el m a -> Iteratee el m [a] c2s = \i -> sequence $ map (\e -> runI =<< e i) takes c2sr = runIdentity $ run =<< enum_pure_1chunk [1..15] (c2s stream2list) -- [[1,2],[3,4,5],[6,7,8,9]]

or parallel composition

c2p :: Monad m => Iteratee el m a -> Iteratee el m [a] c2p = \i -> parallel $ map (\e -> runI =<< e i) takes where parallel [i] = liftM (: []) i parallel (i:t) = do (iv,tv) <- enumPair i (parallel t) return (iv:tv)

c2pr = runIdentity $ run =<< enum_pure_1chunk [1..15] (c2p stream2list) -- [[1,2],[1,2,3],[1,2,3,4]]

Finally, we can compose enumeratees `telescopically': enumeratees are stream converters, which can be arranged into a pipeline -- very much like the Unix Shell pipeline -- to convert the elements of the outer stream further and further.

pipe :: Monad m => (forall a. Enumeratee el1 el2 m a) -> Enumeratee el2 el3 m a -> Enumeratee el1 el3 m a pipe e12 e23 = \i3 -> e12 (e23 i3) >>= runI

(see the source code for the step-wise derivation of that composition).

c4 :: Monad m => Enumeratee el el m a c4 = take 4 `pipe` (take 3 `pipe` take 2)

Piping 'take n_j' into each other is not very interesting. It is easy to see that the result is equivalent to the single take (minimum [n_1,...n_j]).

c4r = runIdentity $ run =<< enum_pure_1chunk [1..15] (runI =<< c4 stream2list) -- [1,2] -- indeed, c4 behaves like take (minimum [2,3,4]) == take 2

To perform the pipeline composition on the list of enumeratees via fold we need impredicative polymorphism -- or at least its emulation, using the newtype trick. The trick makes type abstractions and applications explicit.

newtype EI el1 el2 m = EI{unEI :: forall a. Enumeratee el1 el2 m a} takes' = [EI (take 2), EI (take 3), EI (take 4)]

c4' = foldl1 (\e1 e2 -> EI (unEI e1 `pipe` unEI e2)) takes' c4'' = foldr1 (\e1 e2 -> EI (unEI e1 `pipe` unEI e2)) takes' -- both are equivalent to take (minimum [2,3,4])

The complete source code for the article is available at http://okmij.org/ftp/Haskell/Iteratee/Compose.hs