[Haskell-cafe] Re: Is it possible to read existential types?

[S. Alexander Jacobson]

Ok, but it sounds like you need to know the list
of possible types in advance.  Is it possible
to have a lib take a filepath and type name as an
arbitrary string, and read the instance in?

The context here is that I'm writing an App Server
(tentative name: HAppS) that given an instance of:

    class (Eq state, Read state,Show state
	  ,Eq request, Read request, Show request) =>
	App state request response where
	startState::state
	execRequest::state-> CallBack state -> Chan a -> ReqContext request -> Result state response

takes an arbitrary state, does write-ahead logging
of any requests that change that state, and
periodically saves the state to disk.

If the computer dies or is shutdown for any
reason, the last saved state is read-back from
disk and the log is replayed until state is
current, at which point, new requests may be
processed. (Think Prevayler, but with side-effects
and state saving handled properly -- thanks to
Haskell's type system!)

To use this lib, you do:

   main = (serveApp requestProducer filepaths)::YourAppInstance

serveApp then attempts to read in the state from
the filepaths and calls startState otherwise.
The explicit type here coerces serveApp to read or
startState the proper type (serveApp returns the
state eventually).

The problem is that the type of requestProducer
is sort of complex (simplifying):

   type ReqProd=(((Respond, request) -> IO ()) -> IO t)
   type Respond response = response -> IO ()

It is a function that takes a function that writes
(respond,request) pairs to a channel and when run,
calls that function periodically to interact with
state.  I find this is a bit hard to understand
(and I just wrote the code!).  I'd really like
serveApp to return the writeChannel function and
then have the client code call it.  Then calling
serveApp would look like:

   main = do
    queueReuest <- serveApp filePaths "YourAppInstance"

Even better, I'd love to have the same app be able
to handle multiple request types (via existential
types), but right now, thats not possible because
I need to be able to (read) them.

-Alex-

_________________________________________________________________
S. Alexander Jacobson                  mailto:me at alexjacobson.com
tel:917-770-6565                       http://alexjacobson.com




On Mon, 26 Apr 2004, Chung-chieh Shan wrote:

> S. Alexander Jacobson <alex at alexjacobson.com> wrote in article <Pine.WNT.4.53.0404260740320.2516 at philo> in gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe:
> > Is is possible to read/show an existentially typed
> > list?
> >
> > Would it be possible if, instead of using
> > read/show, I defined some variant that relies on
> > the typeof/typeable infrastructure?  Is there a
> > way to read in a typename for use in coercing a
> > read?
>
> Dylan Thurston and I encountered this problem a while ago.  Show is
> easy: just use a type like "exists a. Show a => ...".  Read is hard,
> because one needs to get the Read dictionary from somewhere, and
> the dynamic typing facility in Haskell does not include type-class
> constraint reduction at runtime.  The best solution we came up with was
> to replace the existentially typed list with a list of string-string
> pairs, where the first string names the type and the second string names
> the value.  The call to "read" is only done at lookup time, not at
> file-reading time.
>
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