The generic HASKELL user's guide : version 0.99 - Amber release

Software development often consists of designing datatypes around which functionality is added. Some functionality is datatype specific, whereas other functionality is defined on almost all datatypes in such a way that it depends only on the structure of the datatype. A function that works on many datatypes in this way is called a generic (or polytypic) function. Examples of generic functionality include storing a value in a database, editing a value, comparing two values for equality, and pretty-printing a value. Since datatypes often change and new datatypes are introduced, we have developed Generic HASKELL which supports generic definitions to save the programmer from (re)writing instances of generic functions. Generic HASKELL extends the functional programming language Haskell [5] with, among other things, a construct for defining type-indexed values with kind-indexed types, based on recent work by Hinze [2]. These values can be specialised to all Haskell datatypes, facilitating wider application of generic programming than provided by earlier systems such as PolyP [4]

Automatic visualization of recursion trees: a case study on generic programming

Although the principles behind generic programming are already well understood, this style of programming is not widespread and examples of applications are rarely found in the literature. This paper addresses this shortage by presenting a new method, based on generic programming, to automatically visualize recursion trees of functions written in Haskell. Crucial to our solution is the fact that almost any function definition can be automatically factorized into the composition of a fold after an unfold of some intermediate data structure that models its recursion tree. By combining this technique with an existing tool for graphical debugging, and by extensively using Generic Haskell, we achieve a rather concise and elegant solution to this problem.Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia - POSI/CHS/44304/2002

Bidirectional Programming and its Applications

Many problems in programming involve pairs of computations that cancel out each other’s effects; some examples include parsing/printing, embed- ding/projection, marshalling/unmarshalling, compressing/de-compressing etc. To avoid duplication of effort, the paradigm of bidirectional programming aims at to allow the programmer to write a single program that expresses both computations. Despite being a promising idea, existing studies mainly focus on the view-update problem in databases and its variants; and the impact of bidirectional programming has not reached the wider community. The goal of this thesis is to demonstrate, through concrete language designs and case studies, the relevance of bidirectional programming, in areas of computer science that have not been previously explored. In this thesis, we will argue for the importance of bidirectional programming in programming language design and compiler implementation. As evidence for this, we will propose a technique for incremental refactoring, which relies for its correctness on a bidirectional language and its properties, and devise a framework for implementing program transformations, with bidirectional properties that allow program analyses to be carried out in the transformed program, and have the results reported in the source program. Our applications of bidirectional programming to new areas bring up fresh challenges. This thesis also reflects on the challenges, and studies their impact to the design of bidirectional systems. We will review various design goals, including expressiveness, robustness, updatability, efficiency and easy of use, and show how certain choices, especially regarding updatability, can have significant influence on the effectiveness of bidirectional systems

How Functorial Are (Deep) GADTs?

It is well-known that GADTs do not admit standard map functions of the kind supported by ADTs and nested types. In addition, standard map functions are insufficient to distribute their data-changing argument functions over all of the structure present in elements of deep GADTs, even just deep ADTs or nested types. This paper develops an algorithm for detecting exactly which functions are mappable over data whose types are (deep) GADTs. The algorithm takes as input a term t whose type is an instance of a deep GADT D and a function f to be mapped over t. It detects a minimal possible shape of t as an element of D, and returns a minimal set of constraints f must satisfy to be mappable over t. The crux of the algorithm is its ability to separate t's essential structure as an element of D -- i.e., the part of t that is essential for it to have the shape of an element of D -- from its incidental structure as an element of D -- i.e., the part of t that is simply data in the positions of this shape. The algorithm ensures that the constraints on f come only from t's essential structure. This work is part of an ongoing effort to define initial algebra semantics for GADTs that properly generalizes the usual semantics for ADTs and nested types as least fix points of higher-order endofunctors

A completely unique account of enumeration

How can we enumerate the inhabitants of an algebraic datatype? This paper explores a datatype generic solution that works for all regular types and indexed families. The enumerators presented here are provably both complete and unique—they will eventually produce every value exactly once—and fair—they avoid bias when composing enumerators. Finally, these enumerators memoise previously enumerated values whenever possible, thereby avoiding repeatedly recomputing recursive results