Use a tuple: (Result,Maybe Error) rather than an Either.  Do everything lazily, and in the case of an error, undo the result. ---------- Původní zpráva ---------- Od: Eric Velten de Melo Datum: 11. 9. 2012 Předmět: [Haskell-cafe] Either Monad and Laziness "Hello, I am currently trying to rewrite the Graphics.Pgm library from hackage to parse the PGM to a lazy array. The current implementation parses it straight to UArray, which is strict. The behaviour I want to achieve is like this: I want the program when compiled to read from a file, parsing the PGM and at the same time apply transformations to the entries as they are read and write them back to another PGM file. The problem is that even using a lazy array structure, because the parser returns an Either structure it is only possible to know if the parser was successful or not after the whole file is read, therefore requiring it to read the entire file before applying the transformations, ruining the property of laziness. Is there some way to keep this from happening? Should I even want to make it like this? Not really a real life situation, but imagine I want to read a reaaaaally large PGM file which does not fit into RAM memory and I don't want to be forced to have the whole array in the memory at once. One alternative I thought was parsing only the PGM header and then read the rest of the input without using Parsec and the Either Monad. In the event the data is corrupted, though, I would not know how to recover from it. Any thoughts? Hopefully I'm not saying anything really stupid. Eric _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe (http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe)"