This package adds three safety features on top of the regular
System.IO file handles and operations:
Regional file handles. Files must be opened in a region. When
the region terminates all opened files are automatically
closed. The main advantage of regions is that the handles to
the opened files can not be returned from the region which
ensures no I/O with closed files is possible.
Explicit IOModes. The regional file handles are parameterized
by the IOMode in which they were opened. All operations on
handles explicitly specify the needed IOMode. This way it is
impossible to read from a write-only handle or write to a
read-only handle for example.
Type-safe filepath creation and manipulation
using the pathtype package.
The primary technique used in this package is called "Lightweight
monadic regions" which was invented by Oleg Kiselyov and
Chung-chieh Shan. See:
http://okmij.org/ftp/Haskell/regions.html#light-weight
This technique is implemented in the regions package which is
re-exported from safer-file-handles.
See the safer-file-handles-examples package for examples how
to use this package:
See the safer-file-handles-bytestring/text package for
ByteString/Text operations on regional file handles.