FliPpr: A Prettier Invertible Printing System

When implementing a programming language, we often write a parser and a pretty-printer. However, manually writing both programs is not only tedious but also error-prone; it may happen that a pretty-printed result is not correctly parsed. In this paper, we propose FliPpr, which is a program transformation system that uses program inversion to produce a CFG parser from a pretty-printer. This novel approach has the advantages of fine-grained control over pretty-printing, and easy reuse of existing efficient pretty-printer and parser implementations

Efficient and Type-Safe Generic Data Storage

AbstractIn this paper we present an elegant method for sequentializing arbitrary data using the generic language extension of the functional programming language Clean. We show how the proposed operations can be used to store values of any concrete data type in several kinds of IO containers (such as files or arrays of characters), and how to manipulate stored data efficiently. Moreover, by extending stored data with encoded type information, data manipulation will be type-safe. Defining these operations generically has the advantage that specific instances for user defined data types can be generated fully automatically. Compared to traditional sequentialization methods (or to common data manipulation, using relational data bases) our operations are an order of magnitude faster

Extensional equality preservation and verified generic programming

In verified generic programming, one cannot exploit the structure of concrete data types but has to rely on well chosen sets of specifications or abstract data types (ADTs). Functors and monads are at the core of many applications of functional programming. This raises the question of what useful ADTs for verified functors and monads could look like. The functorial map of many important monads preserves extensional equality. For instance, if $f, g : A \rightarrow B$ are extensionally equal, that is, $\forall x \in A, \ f \ x = g \ x$, then $map \ f : List \ A \rightarrow List \ B$ and $map \ g$ are also extensionally equal. This suggests that preservation of extensional equality could be a useful principle in verified generic programming. We explore this possibility with a minimalist approach: we deal with (the lack of) extensional equality in Martin-L\"of's intensional type theories without extending the theories or using full-fledged setoids. Perhaps surprisingly, this minimal approach turns out to be extremely useful. It allows one to derive simple generic proofs of monadic laws but also verified, generic results in dynamical systems and control theory. In turn, these results avoid tedious code duplication and ad-hoc proofs. Thus, our work is a contribution towards pragmatic, verified generic programming.Comment: Manuscript ID: JFP-2020-003

Arrows, like Monads, are Monoids

Monads are by now well-established as programming construct in functional languages. Recently, the notion of “Arrow ” was introduced by Hughes as an extension, not with one, but with two type parameters. At first, these Arrows may look somewhat arbitrary. Here we show that they are categorically fairly civilised, by showing that they correspond to monoids in suitable subcategories of bifunctors C op ×C → C. This shows that, at a suitable level of abstraction, arrows are like monads — which are monoids in categories of functors C → C. Freyd categories have been introduced by Power and Robinson to model computational effects, well before Hughes ’ Arrows appeared. It is often claimed (informally) that Arrows are simply Freyd categories. We shall make this claim precise by showing how monoids in categories of bifunctors exactly correspond to Freyd categories

Polytypic Data Conversion Programs

Several generic programs for converting values from regular datatypes to some other format, together with their corresponding inverses, are constructed. Among the formats considered are shape plus contents, compact bit streams and pretty printed strings. The different data conversion programs are constructed using John Hughes' arrow combinators along with a proof that printing (from a regular datatype to another format) followed by parsing (from that format back to the regular datatype) is the identity. The printers and parsers are described in PolyP, a polytypic extension of the functional language Haskell