User-interface and Menu in Haskell - user-interface

I am creating social network in haskell based on graphs. The problem is that I want to create a user interface for people to interact. This user interface should consists of text that shows what the options are and based on key inputs, users can search the database and perform actions on the data set.
What I have already done:
-Explored this thread "Simple text menu in Haskell"
-Installed packages such as haskelline
Problem is that I have just started learning Haskell and the progress has been damn slow compared to my experience with other languages, so I havent benefitted from the above resources to an extent that has solved my problem.
Would someone be kind enough to share a template consisting of a CL interface menu screen. That asks users to press keys mapped for different functions. Then after output, goes back to the main menu.
Here is an example of what my functions look like.
isFriend :: Node -> Node -> [Edge] -> Bool
isFriend _ _ [] = False
isFriend a b (x:xs)
| edgeCompare a b x == True = True
| otherwise = isFriend a b xs
So the menu could say "press I" to search for friends, that would prompt the user to enter a name. This would run my function with the argument inputted by the user.
Thank you :)

Based on this answer, I've created this:
import System.IO (stdin, hSetEcho, hSetBuffering, BufferMode(NoBuffering), hReady)
import Control.Monad (when)
getKey = reverse <$> getKey' ""
where getKey' chars = do
char <- getChar
more <- hReady stdin
(if more then getKey' else return) (char:chars)
-- Simple menu controller
main = do
hSetBuffering stdin NoBuffering
hSetEcho stdin False
key <- getKey
when (key /= "\ESC") $ do
case key of
"w" -> putStrLn "↑"
"s" -> putStrLn "↓"
"d" -> putStrLn "→"
"a" -> putStrLn "←"
"\n" -> putStrLn "⎆"
"\DEL" -> putStrLn "⎋"
_ -> return ()
main
[1] also shows how to detect arrow key presses, which is cool! Changing the line buffering of stdin is important.
You'll probably want your application loop to have some initial application state, and pass it around as an argument.

Related

F# using match to validate parameters

I'm learning F#. I want to know best practices for validating input parameters. In my naivety I had thought I could do something like this:
let foo = match bar with
| <test for valid> -> bar
| _ -> "invalid"
of course that doesn't work due to mismatching types. So I'd like to see the patterns experienced F# programmers use for this sort of thing. match? If/then/else?
Something else?
You are having problems because you are trying to bind a value to something that could be two possible types depending upon program flow - that is incompatible with static typing.
If I have some value foo, it cannot be, for example, a string OR an int depending upon program flow; it must resolve to exactly one type at compile time.
You can, however, use a discriminated union that can represent several different options within a single type.
Here is a summary of the approaches for doing just that.
Result Type / Either
F# 4.1, which is currently available via nuget, introduces the Result type. You may find this type referred to as Either in other languages.
It is defined like this:
[<Struct>]
type Result<'T,'TError> =
/// Represents an OK or a Successful result. The code succeeded with a value of 'T.
| Ok of ResultValue:'T
/// Represents an Error or a Failure. The code failed with a value of 'TError representing what went wrong.
| Error of ErrorValue:'TError
If you are pre-F# 4.1 (which is very likely). You can define this type yourself, although you must remove the [<Struct>] attribute.
You can then make a tryParseFloat function:
let tryParseFloat str =
match System.Double.TryParse str with
| true, f -> Ok f
| _ -> Error <| sprintf "Supplied string (%s) is not a valid float" str
You can determine success or failure:
match tryParseFloat "0.0001" with
|Ok v -> // handle success
|Error err -> // handle error
In my opinion, this is the preferred option, especially in F# 4.1+ where the type is built in. This is because it allows you to include information relating to how and why some activity failed.
Option Type / Maybe
The option type contains either Some 'T or simply None. The option type is used to indicate the presence or absence of a value, None fills a role similar to null in other languages, albeit far more safely.
You may find this type referred to as Maybe in other languages.
let tryParseFloat str =
match System.Double.TryParse str with
| true, f -> Some f
| _ -> None
You can determine success or failure:
match tryParseFloat "0.0001" with
|Some value -> // handle success
|None -> // handle error
Composition
In both cases, you can readily compose options or results using the associated map and bind functions in the Option and Result modules respectively:
Map:
val map: mapping:('T -> 'U) -> option:'T option -> 'U option
val map : mapping:('T -> 'U) -> result:Result<'T, 'TError> -> Result<'U, 'TError>
The map function lets you take an ordinary function from 'a -> 'b and makes it operate on results or options.
Use case: combine a result with a function that will always succeed and return a new result.
tryParseFloat "0.001" |> Result.map (fun x -> x + 1.0);;
val it : Result<float,string> = Ok 1.001
Bind:
val bind: binder:('T -> 'U option) -> option:'T option -> 'U option
val bind: binder:('T -> Result<'U, 'TError>) -> result:Result<'T, 'TError> -> Result<'U, 'TError>
The bind function lets you combine results or options with a function that takes an input and generates a result or option
Use case: combine a result with another function that may succeed or fail and return a new result.
Example:
let trySqrt x =
if x < 0.0 then Error "sqrt of negative number is imaginary"
else Ok (sqrt x)
tryParseFloat "0.001" |> Result.bind (fun x -> trySqrt x);;
val it : Result<float,string> = Ok 0.0316227766
tryParseFloat "-10.0" |> Result.bind (fun x -> trySqrt x);;
val it : Result<float,string> = Error "sqrt of negative number is imaginary"
tryParseFloat "Picard's Flute" |> Result.bind (fun x -> trySqrt x);;
val it : Result<float,string> =
Error "Supplied string (Picard's Flute) is not a valid float"
Notice that in both cases, we return a single result or option despite chaining multiple actions - that means that by following these patterns you need only check the result once, after all of your validation is complete.
This avoids a potential readability nightmare of nested if statements or match statements.
A good place to read more about this is the Railway Oriented Programming article that was mentioned to you previously.
Exceptions
Finally, you have the option of throwing exceptions as a way of preventing some value from validating. This is definitely not preferred if you expect it to occur but if the event is truly exceptional, this could be the best alternative.
The basic way of representing invalid states in F# is to use the option type, which has two possible values. None represents invalid state and Some(<v>) represents a valid value <v>.
So in your case, you could write something like:
let foo =
match bar with
| <test for valid> -> Some(bar)
| _ -> None
The match construct works well if <test for valid> is actual pattern (e.g. empty list or a specific invalid number or a null value), but if it is just a boolean expression, then it is probably better to write the condition using if:
let foo =
if <test for valid> bar then Some(bar)
else None
You could do something along this lines
type Bar =
| Bar of string
| Foo of int
let (|IsValidStr|_|) x = if x = Bar "bar" then Some x else None
let (|IsValidInt|_|) x = if x = Foo 0 then Some x else None
let foo (bar:Bar) =
match bar with
| IsValidStr x -> Some x
| IsValidInt x -> Some x
| _ -> None
That is you could use active patterns to check for the actual business rules and return an Option instance
Based on what the OP wrote in the comments:
You would define a type as in the post that Fyodor linked, that captures your two possible outcomes:
type Result<'TSuccess,'TFailure> =
| Success of 'TSuccess
| Failure of 'TFailure
Your validation code becomes:
let checkBool str =
match bool.TryParse str with
| true, b -> Success b
| _ -> Failure ("I can't parse this: " + str)
When using it, again use match:
let myInput = "NotABool"
match checkBool myInput with
| Success b -> printfn "I'm happy: %O" b
| Failure f -> printfn "Did not like because: %s" f
If you only would like to continue with valid bools, your code can only fail on invalid arguments, so you would do:
let myValidBool =
match checkBool myInput with
| Success b -> b
| Failure f -> failwithf "I did not like the args because: %s" f

efficiently reading a large file into a Map

I'm trying to write code to perform the following simple task in Haskell: looking up the etymologies of words using this dictionary, stored as a large tsv file (http://www1.icsi.berkeley.edu/~demelo/etymwn/). I thought I'd parse (with attoparsec) the tsv file into a Map, which I could then use to look up etymologies efficiently, as required (and do some other stuff with).
This was my code:
{-# LANGUAGE OverloadedStrings #-}
import Control.Arrow
import qualified Data.Map as M
import Control.Applicative
import qualified Data.Text as DT
import qualified Data.Text.Lazy.IO as DTLIO
import qualified Data.Text.Lazy as DTL
import qualified Data.Attoparsec.Text.Lazy as ATL
import Data.Monoid
text = do
x <- DTLIO.readFile "../../../../etymwn.tsv"
return $ DTL.take 10000 x
--parsers
wordpair = do
x <- ATL.takeTill (== ':')
ATL.char ':' *> (ATL.many' $ ATL.char ' ')
y <- ATL.takeTill (\x -> x `elem` ['\t','\n'])
ATL.char '\n' <|> ATL.char '\t'
return (x,y)
--line of file
line = do
a <- (ATL.count 3 wordpair)
case (rel (a !! 2)) of
True -> return . (\[a,b,c] -> [(a,c)]) $ a
False -> return . (\[a,b,c] -> [(c,a)]) $ a
where rel x = if x == ("rel","etymological_origin_of") then False else True
tsv = do
x <- ATL.many1 line
return $ fmap M.fromList x
main = (putStrLn . show . ATL.parse tsv) =<< text
It works for small amounts of input, but quickly grows too inefficient. I'm not quite clear on where the problem is, and soon realized that even trivial tasks like viewing the last character of the file were taking too long when I tried, e.g. with
foo = fmap DTL.last $ DTLIO.readFile "../../../../etymwn.tsv
So my questions are: what are the main things that I'm doing wrong, in terms of approach and execution? Any tips for more Haskelly/better code?
Thanks,
Reuben
Note that the file you want to load has 6 million lines and
the text you are interested in storing comprises approx. 120 MB.
Lower Bounds
To establish some lower bounds I first created another .tsv file containing
the preprocessed contents of the etymwn.tsv file. I then timed how it
took for this perl program to read that file:
my %H;
while (<>) {
chomp;
my ($a,$b) = split("\t", $_, 2);
$H{$a} = $b;
}
This took approx. 17 secs., so I would expect any Haskell program to
take about that about of time.
If this start-up time is unacceptable, consider the following options:
Work in ghci and use the "live reloading" technique to save the map
using the Foreign.Store package
so that it persists through ghci code reloads.
That way you only have to load the map data once as you iterate your code.
Use a persistent key-value store (such as sqlite, gdbm, BerkeleyDB)
Access the data through a client-server store
Reduce the number of key-value pairs you store (do you need all 6 million?)
Option 1 is discussed in this blog post by Chris Done:
Reload Running Code in GHCI
Options 2 and 3 will require you to work in the IO monad.
Parsing
First of all, check the type of your tsv function:
tsv :: Data.Attoparsec.Internal.Types.Parser
DT.Text [M.Map (DT.Text, DT.Text) (DT.Text, DT.Text)]
You are returning a list of maps instead of just one map. This doesn't look
right.
Secondly, as #chi suggested, I doubt that using attoparsec is lazy.
In partcular, it has to verify that the entire parse succeeds,
so I can't see how it cannot avoid creating all of the parsed lines
before returning.
To truely parse the input lazily, take the following approach:
toPair :: DT.Text -> (Key, Value)
toPair input = ...
main = do
all_lines <- fmap DTL.lines $ DTLIO.getContent
let m = M.fromList $ map toPair all_lines
print $ M.lookup "foobar" m
You can still use attoparsec to implement toPair, but you'll be using it
on a line-by-line basis instead of on the entire input.
ByteString vs. Text
In my experience working with ByteStrings is much faster than working with Text.
This version of toPair for ByteStrings is about 4 times faster than the corresponding
version for Text:
{-# LANGUAGE OverloadedStrings #-}
import qualified Data.ByteString.Lazy.Char8 as L
import qualified Data.Attoparsec.ByteString.Char8 as A
import qualified Data.Attoparsec.ByteString.Lazy as AL
toPair :: L.ByteString -> (L.ByteString, L.ByteString)
toPair bs =
case AL.maybeResult (AL.parse parseLine bs) of
Nothing -> error "bad line"
Just (a,b) -> (a,b)
where parseLine = do
A.skipWhile (/= ' ')
A.skipWhile (== ' ')
a <- A.takeWhile (/= '\t')
A.skipWhile (== '\t')
rel <- A.takeWhile (/= '\t')
A.skipWhile (== '\t')
A.skipWhile (/= ' ')
A.skipWhile (== ' ')
c <- A.takeWhile (const True)
if rel == "rel:etymological_origin_of"
then return (c,a)
else return (a,c)
Or, just use plain ByteString functions:
fields :: L.ByteString -> [L.ByteString]
fields = L.splitWith (== '\t')
snipSpace = L.ByteString -> L.ByteString
snipSpace = L.dropWhile (== ' ') . L.dropWhile (/=' ')
toPair'' bs =
let fs = fields bs
case fields line of
(x:y:z:_) -> let a = snipSpace x
c = snipSpace z
in
if y == "rel:etymological_origin_of"
then (c,a)
else (a,c)
_ -> error "bad line"
Most of the time spent loading the map is in parsing the lines.
For ByteStrings this is about 14 sec. to load all 6 million lines
vs. 50 secs. for Text.
To add to this answer, I'd like to note that attoparsec actually has very good support for "pull-based" incremental parsing. You can use this directly with the convenient parseWith function. For even finer control, you can feed the parser by hand with parse and feed. If you don't want to worry about any of this, you should be able to use something like pipes-attoparsec, but personally I find pipes a bit hard to understand.

Traverse an Abstract Syntax Tree

I plunged in an attemp to translate Haskell.
I need walk the HsModule structure (returned by parseModule source),
to translate every HsIdent String, where String is an english identifier
into HsIdent String, where String is an identifier in some other natural language (i.e. italian, french, ...).
I wonder if exists some direct strategy, perhaps in TH, to walk a HsModule Structure (i.e. to apply a function to every HsIdent String), without explicit unfold-functions for the involved substructures?
I hope I was plain enough in my request; many thanks for your precious aid.
Best regards.
I found a solution in Data.Generics packages.
HsModule is an instance of Data and Typeable, so it is eligible to process it with a traverse function of a Generic package. I chose SYB because is quite well documented .
My solution is:
module Main where
import Data.Generics
import Language.Haskell.Syntax
import Language.Haskell.Parser
import Language.Haskell.Pretty
import Control.Monad
translate:: ParseResult HsModule -> Maybe String
translate r = case r of
ParseOk a -> Just (show $ prettyPrint $ translateHsIdent "_italian" a)
ParseFailed _ _ -> Nothing
translateHsIdent :: Data a => String -> a -> a
translateHsIdent k = everywhere (mkT (addStrangerIdentifier k))
where
addStrangerIdentifier :: String -> HsName -> HsName
addStrangerIdentifier s (HsIdent i) = HsIdent (i ++ s)
main = maybe (putStrLn "Parse Error") putStrLn result
where
result :: Maybe String
result = translate $ parseModule "main = putStrLn \"Just a Try\""
I hope it can be useful for someone else.

OCaml event/channel tutorial?

I'm in OCaml.
I'm looking to simulate communicating nodes to look at how quickly messages propagate under different communication schemes etc.
The nodes can 1. send and 2. receive a fixed message. I guess the obvious thing to do is have each node as a separate thread.
Apparently you can get threads to pass messages to each other using the Event module and channels, but I can't find any examples of this. Can someone point me in the right direction or just give me a simple relevant example?
Thanks a lot.
Yes, you can use the Event module of OCaml. You can find an example of its use in the online O'Reilly book.
If you are going to attempt a simulation, then you will need a lot more control over your nodes than simply using threads will allow — or at least, without major pains.
My subjective approach to the topic would be to create a simple, single-threaded virtual machine in order to keep full control over the simulation. The easiest way to do so in OCaml is to use a monad-like structure (as is done in Lwt, for instance) :
(* A thread is a piece of code that can be executed to perform some
side-effects and fork zero, one or more threads before returning.
Some threads may block when waiting for an event to happen. *)
type thread = < run : thread list ; block : bool >
(* References can be used as communication channels out-of-the box (simply
read and write values ot them). To implement a blocking communication
pattern, use these two primitives: *)
let write r x next = object (self)
method block = !r <> None
method run = if self # block then [self]
else r := Some x ; [next ()]
end
let read r next = object (self)
method block = !r = None
method run = match r with
| None -> [self]
| Some x -> r := None ; [next x]
end
You can create better primitives that suit your needs, such as adding a "time required for transmitting" property in your channels.
The next step is defining a simulation engine.
(* The simulation engine can be implemented as a simple queue. It starts
with a pre-defined set of threads and returns when no threads are left,
or when all threads are blocking. *)
let simulate threads =
let q = Queue.create () in
let () = List.iter (fun t -> Queue.push t q) threads in
let rec loop blocking =
if Queue.is_empty q then `AllThreadsTerminated else
if Queue.length q = blocking then `AllThreadsBlocked else
let thread = Queue.pop q in
if thread # block then (
Queue.push thread q ;
loop (blocking + 1)
) else (
List.iter (fun t -> Queue.push t q) (thread # run) ;
loop 0
)
in
loop 0
Again, you may adjust the engine to keep track of what node is executing which thread, to keep per-node priorities in order to simulate one node being massively slower or faster than others, or randomly picking a thread for execution on every step, and so on.
The last step is executing a simulation. Here, I'm going to have two threads sending random numbers back and forth.
let rec thread name input output =
write output (Random.int 1024) (fun () ->
read input (fun value ->
Printf.printf "%s : %d" name value ;
print_newline () ;
thread name input output
))
let a = ref None and b = ref None
let _ = simulate [ thread "A -> B" a b ; thread "B -> A" b a ]
It sounds like you're thinking of John Reppy's Concurrent ML. There seems to be something similar for OCaml here.
The answer #Thomas has given is also valuable, but if you want to use this style of concurrent programming I would recommend reading John Reppy's PhD thesis which is extremely readable and gives a very clear treatment of the motivation behind CML and some substantial examples of its use. If you aren't interested in the semantics the document is still readable if you skip that part.

Debugging HXT performance problems

I'm trying to use HXT to read in some big XML data files (hundreds of MB.)
My code has a space-leak somewhere, but I can't seem to find it. I do have a little bit of a clue as to what is happening thanks to my very limited knowledge of the ghc profiling tool chain.
Basically, the document is parsed, but not evaluated.
Here's some code:
{-# LANGUAGE Arrows, NoMonomorphismRestriction #-}
import Text.XML.HXT.Core
import System.Environment (getArgs)
import Control.Monad (liftM)
main = do file <- (liftM head getArgs) >>= parseTuba
case file of(Left m) -> print "Failed."
(Right _) -> print "Success."
data Sentence t = Sentence [Node t] deriving Show
data Node t = Word { wSurface :: !t } deriving Show
parseTuba :: FilePath -> IO (Either String ([Sentence String]))
parseTuba f = do r <- runX (readDocument [] f >>> process)
case r of
[] -> return $ Left "No parse result."
[pr] -> return $ Right pr
_ -> return $ Left "Ambiguous parse result!"
process :: (ArrowXml a) => a XmlTree ([Sentence String])
process = getChildren >>> listA (tag "sentence" >>> listA word >>> arr (\ns -> Sentence ns))
word :: (ArrowXml a) => a XmlTree (Node String)
word = tag "word" >>> getAttrValue "form" >>> arr (\s -> Word s)
-- | Gets the tag with the given name below the node.
tag :: (ArrowXml a) => String -> a XmlTree XmlTree
tag s = getChildren >>> isElem >>> hasName s
I'm trying to read a corpus file, and the structure is obviously something like <corpus><sentence><word form="Hello"/><word form="world"/></sentence></corpus>.
Even on the very small development corpus, the program takes ~15 secs to read it in, of which around 20% are GC time (that's way too much.)
In particular, a lot of data is spending way too much time in DRAG state. This is the profile:
monitoring DRAG culprits. You can see that decodeDocument gets called a lot, and its data is then stalled until the very end of the execution.
Now, I think this should be easily fixed by folding all this decodeDocument stuff into my data structures (Sentence and Word) and then the RT can forget about these thunks. The way it's currently happening though, is that the folding happens at the very end when I force evaluation by deconstruction of Either in the IO monad, where it could easily happen online. I see no reason for this, and my attempts to strictify the program have so far been in vain. I hope somebody can help me :-)
I just can't even figure out too many places to put seqs and $!s in…
One possible thing to try: the default hxt parser is strict, but there does exist a lazy parser based on tagsoup: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/hxt-tagsoup
In understand that expat can do lazy processing as well: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/hxt-expat
You may want to see if switching parsing backends, by itself, solves your issue.

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