Behavior in reactive-banana

Question

Pardon me, I'm just starting to look into reactive-banana and FRP.

The author of reactive-banana made this example per my suggestion, in which he creates a counter which can be increased and decreased. He uses accumE function which accumulates events. I think I was able to somewhat grok the Event type, and was able to test quite a few things with it, but then I remembered that there was also Behavior. I looked into it, but it seems like the behavior is meant to be used in similar situations; to modify an existing variable, just like accumE does with events.

What does Behavior mean, and what are the use cases for it?

Answer 1

I agree with Ankur rather than Chris: a text box is a value over time and so naturally wants to be a behavior rather than an event. The reasons Chris give for the less natural choice of event are implementation issues and so (if accurate) an unfortunate artifact of the reactive-banana implementation. I'd much rather see the implementation improved than the paradigm used unnaturally.

Besides the semantic fit, it's pragmatically very useful to choose Behavior over Event. You can then, for instance, use the Applicative operations (e.g., liftA2) to combine the time-varying text box value with other time-varying values (behaviors).