On 03/10/2009 19:59, Florian Weimer wrote:
* Nicolas Pouillard:
Excerpts from Florian Weimer's message of Wed Sep 16 22:17:08 +0200 2009:
Are there any plans to get rid of hGetContents and the semi-closed
handle state for Haskell Prime?
(I call hGetContents unsafe because it adds side effects to pattern
matching, stricly speaking invalidating most of the transformations
which are expected to be valid in a pure language.)
Would you consider something like [1] as an acceptable replacement?
[1]: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/safe-lazy-io
It only addresses two known issues with lazy I/O, doesn't it? It
still injects input operations into pure code not in the IO monad.
While what you say is true, and I've complained about the same thing
myself in the past, it turns out to be quite difficult to demonstrate
the unsafety.
Try it! Here's the rules.
- write a program that gives different results when compiled with
different optimisation flags only. (one exception: you're not
allowed to take advantage of -fno-state-hack).
- Using exceptions is not allowed (they're non-determinstic).
- A difference caused by resources (e.g. stack overflow) doesn't
count.
- The only "unsafe" operation you're allowed to use is hGetContents.
- You're allowed to use any other I/O operations, including from
libraries, as long as they're not unsafe, and as long as the I/O
itself is deterministic.
The reason it's hard is that to demonstrate a difference you have to get
the lazy I/O to commute with some other I/O, and GHC will never do that.
If you find a way to do it, then we'll probably consider it a bug in GHC.
You can get lazy I/O to commute with other lazy I/O, and perhaps with
some cunning arrangement of pipes (or something) that might be a way to
solve the puzzle. Good luck!
Cheers,
Simon
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