[Haskell-cafe] A curios monad

[Andrew Coppin]

Yesterday I wrote something slightly unusual:


module Storage where

data Storage x
instance Monad Storage
run :: Storage x -> x

data Key v
instance Eq (Key v)
instance Ord (Key v)

new_key :: v -> Storage (Key v)
set_key :: Key v -> v -> Storage ()
get_key :: Key v -> Storage (Maybe v)
delete_key :: Key v -> Storage ()


In other words, you can store a value (of arbitrary type) under a unique 
key. The monad chooses what key for you, and tells you the key so you 
can look up or alter the value again later. Under the covers, it uses 
Data.Map to store stuff. I used some trickery with existential 
quantification and unsafeCoerce (!!) to make it work. Notice the sneaky 
phantom type in the key, telling the type system what type to coerce the 
value back to when you read it. Neat, eh?

...until I realised that somebody that somebody could generate a key in 
one run and then try to use it in another run. o_O

Oops!

But hey, until then it was working quite well. And completely pure; no 
IO anywhere.

Ah well, just thought I'd share...

(You could of course do away with the monad, but then you'd be able to 
manipulate the dictionary directly, and key uniqueness would be even 
more fragile!)