[Haskell-cafe] Iteratees again (Was: How on Earth Do You Reason about Space?)

Ketil Malde ketil at malde.org
Thu Jun 2 13:52:52 CEST 2011


By the way, what is the advantage of using iteratees here?  For my
testing, I just used:

  main = printit . freqs . B.words =<< B.readFile "words"

(where 'printit' writes some data to stdout just to make sure stuff is
evaluated, and you've already seen some 'freqs' examples)

I have a bunch of old code, parsers etc, which are based on the
'readFile' paradigm:

  type Str = Data.ByteString.Lazy.Char8.ByteString -- usually

  decodeFoo :: Str -> Foo
  encodeFoo :: Foo -> Str

  readFoo = decodeFoo . readFile 
  writeFoo f = writeFile f . encodeFoo
  hReadFoo = decodeFoo . hRead
  :
  (etc)

This works pretty well, as long as Foo is strict enough that you don't
retain all or huge parts of input, and as long as you can process input
in a forward, linear fashion.  And, like my frequency count above, I
can't really see how this can be made much simpler.

I haven't used iteratees or enumartors in anger, but it appears to me
that they are most useful when the input is unpredictable or needs to be
controlled in some way - for instance, when recv() can return a blocks
of data that may be too little or too much.

Would there be any great advantage to rewriting my stuff to use
iterators?  Or at least, use iterators for new stuff?

As I see it, iterators are complex and the dust is only starting to
settle on implementations and interfaces, and will introduce more
dependencies.  So my instinct is to stick with the worse-is-better
approach, but I'm willing to be educated.

-k
-- 
If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants



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