Sam Lindley is giving this month's EdLambda talk on Tuesday 17th at 7pm
at The Outhouse pub. It'll be based with Ohad Kammar and Nicolas Oury:
"Handlers in action". Sam will probably focus mostly on examples from
their Haskell effect handler library, perhaps with some live hacking.
Abstract
---
Plotkin and Pretnar’s handlers for algebraic effects occupy a sweet spot
in the design space of abstractions for effectful computation. By
separating effect signatures from their implementation, algebraic
effects provide a high degree of modularity, allowing programmers to
express effectful programs independently of the concrete interpretation
of their effects. A handler is an interpretation of the effects of an
algebraic computation. The handler abstraction adapts well to multiple
settings: pure or impure, strict or lazy, static types or dynamic types.
This is a position paper whose main aim is to popularise the handler
abstraction. We give a gentle introduction to its use, a collection of
illustrative examples, and a straightforward operational semantics. We
describe our Haskell implementation of handlers in detail, outline the
ideas behind our OCaml, SML, and Racket implementations, and present
experimental results comparing handlers with existing code.
