Abbott, Altenkirch, Ghani and others have taught us that many parameterized
datatypes (set functors) can be usefully analyzed via container representations
in terms of a set of shapes and a set of positions in each shape. This paper
builds on the observation that datatypes often carry additional structure that
containers alone do not account for. We introduce directed containers to
capture the common situation where every position in a data-structure
determines another data-structure, informally, the sub-data-structure rooted by
that position. Some natural examples are non-empty lists and node-labelled
trees, and data-structures with a designated position (zippers). While
containers denote set functors via a fully-faithful functor, directed
containers interpret fully-faithfully into comonads. But more is true: every
comonad whose underlying functor is a container is represented by a directed
container. In fact, directed containers are the same as containers that are
comonads. We also describe some constructions of directed containers. We have
formalized our development in the dependently typed programming language Agda
