In my quest for a simple way to draw with haskell led me to struggle with curses, but I simultaneously discovered and struggled with gtk2hs, a package with haskell bindings to the gtk libraries. Gtk has integrated support for Cairo, a mature graphics library and has a lot of documentation and support.
However, the way things are drawn to the screen changed a lot between Gtk2 and Gtk3. Some functionality has been deprecated, so most gtk2hs demos do not work with Gtk3. Gtk2 is no longer supported in recent versions of Ubuntu, and I have no desire to compile unsupported libraries on my own, so I decided instead to try to make the gtk2hs demos work with Gtk3. The effort was going pretty well until I tried to update keyboard event bindings, for example, that pressing the Escape key closes the window:
window `on` keyPressEvent $ tryEvent $ do
"Escape" <- eventKeyName
liftIO mainQuit
This results in the error:
Couldn't match type ‘[Char]’ with ‘Data.Text.Internal.Text’
Expected type: System.Glib.UTFString.DefaultGlibString
Actual type: [Char]
In the pattern: "Escape"
In a stmt of a 'do' block: "Escape" <- eventKeyName
In the second argument of ‘($)’, namely
‘do { "Escape" <- eventKeyName;
liftIO mainQuit }’
At some point between when this demo was written and modern versions of gtk2hs and haskell, the required type of eventKeyName changed from [Char] to Text. My first guess was to simply attempt to construct a new Text, using:
import Data.Text
...
(Text "Escape") <- eventKeyName
But the error informs me that I don’t understand how the Text constructor works:
Constructor ‘Text’ should have 3 arguments, but has been given 1
In the pattern: Text "Escape"
The description of the Text constructor is:
Construct a Text without invisibly pinning its byte array in memory if its length has dwindled to zero.
No explanation of what the two first integers are, but seeing the mention of memory manipulation makes me freak out a little. Hopefully there’s some other method for converting [Char] to Text. It looks like pack is what I need:
(pack "Escape") <- eventKeyName
This results in the error:
Parse error in pattern: pack
Possibly caused by a missing 'do'?
I don’t understand why I’m getting this error, but I’m guessing it’s because I can’t call a function in a case situation like that. So what if I take it out of the event monad?
escText <- pack "Escape"
window `on` keyPressEvent $ tryEvent $ do
escText <- eventKeyName
liftIO mainQuit
This results in the error:
Couldn't match expected type ‘IO t0’ with actual type ‘Text’
In a stmt of a 'do' block: escText <- pack "Escape"
Since I’m getting deeper and deeper down a rabbit hole of string conversions, maybe there’s a way for haskell to interpret string literals in the way that eventKeyName needs. A similar question on stack overflow suggests that I need to add:
{-# LANGUAGE OverloadedStrings #-}
to the top of the script. Doing that clears the error around eventKeyName, but it creates errors on every other string literal:
No instance for (Data.String.IsString b0)
arising from the literal ‘"Gtk2Hs Cairo Clock"’
The type variable ‘b0’ is ambiguous
Note: there are several potential instances:
instance Data.String.IsString
Data.ByteString.Builder.Internal.Builder
-- Defined in ‘Data.ByteString.Builder’
instance Data.String.IsString Text -- Defined in ‘Data.Text’
instance Data.String.IsString [Char] -- Defined in ‘Data.String’
In the second argument of ‘(:=)’, namely ‘"Gtk2Hs Cairo Clock"’
In the expression: windowTitle := "Gtk2Hs Cairo Clock"
In the second argument of ‘set’, namely
‘[containerChild := canvas, windowDecorated := False,
windowResizable := True, windowTitle := "Gtk2Hs Cairo Clock"]’
But now I know that I can convert strings to Text with pack, so that should make haskell less ambiguous:
set window [ containerChild := canvas, windowDecorated := False,
windowResizable := True, windowTitle := (pack "Gtk2Hs Cairo Clock") ]
And it works!
But I can’t help feel like I’ve cheated somehow. There’s probably a better way to define strings.