Hello,
I'm writing my first serious Ocaml library and have a question, which I'll state later on.
Most of the functions in my library take a parameter that describes the current environment. I call this data type, "context". The context is passed to a function which will then use other functions in the library to get its job done. The signature of the function that starts all this is:
val usingContext : (context -> 'a) -> 'a
('usingContext' takes other parameters which are used to create the context parameter. I dropped them in this example to simplify the problem.)
So 'usingContext' creates a context and passes it to the given function. 'usingContext' will free up the resources of the context whether the function parameter returns normally, or throws an exception. After cleaning up the resources, it returns the value returned by the function parameter (or re-raises the exception.)
My question is this: Is there a way to make the compiler reject a function parameter from returning the context parameter? For instance, the identity function should be disallowed since the context is invalid outside the scope of 'usingContext'. It's true that a returned context would be unusable, since its resources are gone, but it would be nice to prevent contexts from escaping the 'usingContext' function entirely.
I'm aware that the ST monad, in Haskell, uses some forall abilities to prevent stuff from leaving the ST monad. Hopefully there's a way to achieve this using Ocaml.
(I realize that making this context a monad is a legitimate solution. However, until I see the Ocaml community including monads in the standard library, I think I'll stick with idiomatic Ocaml. I'd also like to solve this functionally, so I'm discounting the use of objects. Sorry for these constraints!)
Thanks for any help you can provide!