gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe

Sean Perry | 18 Feb 10:57

new Haskell hacker seeking peer review

I am learning Haskell, so I decided to implement everyone's favorite,
overused Unix command -- cat. Below is my simple implementation,
comments about style, implementation, etc. are welcomed.

In particular, is my untilEOF idiomatically ok? Is there a better way to
accomplish this? Also, while talking about untilEOF, it is slightly
annoying that hIsEOF returns IO Bool and that functions like 'not' only
want Bool. Sure makes the logic tests feel like more work than they
should be.

cat.hs:
module Main where

import IO
import System(getArgs)

untilEOF :: Handle -> (Handle -> IO ()) -> IO ()
untilEOF hdl f = do eof <- hIsEOF hdl
                     if eof then return ()
                            else do f hdl
                                    untilEOF hdl f

cat :: Handle -> IO ()
cat hdl = do line <- hGetLine hdl
              putStrLn line

catFile :: FilePath -> IO ()
catFile path = do hdl <- openFile path ReadMode
                   untilEOF hdl cat

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Bernard Pope | 18 Feb 11:45

Re: new Haskell hacker seeking peer review

On Fri, 2005-02-18 at 01:58 -0800, Sean Perry wrote:
> I am learning Haskell, so I decided to implement everyone's favorite,
> overused Unix command -- cat. Below is my simple implementation,
> comments about style, implementation, etc. are welcomed.
> 
> In particular, is my untilEOF idiomatically ok? Is there a better way to
> accomplish this? 

Haskell allows lazy IO. One example is hGetContents (and getContents
which is specialised for stdin):

   hGetContents :: Handle -> IO String

It looks like you get the whole file contents at once, but under the
hood it is read on demand.

This allows you to avoid the awkward tests for EOF.

Lazy IO is not without its problems, in particular it makes life hard
for the people who implement the compilers. You should look around the 
haskell list archives for the discussions about lazy that have happened
in the past.

Cheers,
Bernie.

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Jules Bean | 18 Feb 13:41

Re: new Haskell hacker seeking peer review

Hi Sean,

I'm not expert, but since you asked for idiomatic comments, here are a 
few...

On 18 Feb 2005, at 09:58, Sean Perry wrote:

> Also, while talking about untilEOF, it is slightly
> annoying that hIsEOF returns IO Bool and that functions like 'not' only
> want Bool. Sure makes the logic tests feel like more work than they
> should be.

`Annoying' in some sense, but it could hardly be any other way. You can 
always lift 'not' into the IO monad, as in (liftM not).hIsEOF

> untilEOF :: Handle -> (Handle -> IO ()) -> IO ()
> untilEOF hdl f = do eof <- hIsEOF hdl
>                     if eof then return ()
>                            else do f hdl
>                                    untilEOF hdl f
>

This idiom with if .. then return () else ... is the 'unless' idiom 
from Control.Monad:

untilEOF hdl f = do eof <- hIsEOF hdl
                     unless eof $ do f hdl
                                     untilEOF hdl f

there is also 'when' for the opposite. Here is an example just to

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