[Haskell-beginners] hiding members of a data, separate accessors instead

[Emmanuel Touzery]

But then since the library is using (..) that would mean everything is
exported?

For instance testing on the Request data:

http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/http-streams/0.4.0.0/doc/html/src/Network-Http-Types.html#Request

module Network.Http.Types (    Request(..),

data Request    = Request {        qMethod  :: !Method,        qHost
 ::  Maybe ByteString,        qPath    :: !ByteString,        qBody
:: !EntityBody,        qExpect  :: !ExpectMode,        qHeaders ::
!Headers    }


----
{-# LANGUAGE OverloadedStrings #-}

import Network.Http.Client

main = do
    q <- buildRequest $ do
        http GET "/"
        setAccept "text/html"

    print q
    print $ qMethod q

---

test-hs.hs:11:17: Not in scope: `qMethod'

With regards to what Daniel wrote, I realize my email was confusing. When I
was talking about warnings I was talking of another problem entirely, that
i probably should not have mentioned in this context.
In that other context I had data declarations for types that I would
instanciate only from Data.Aeson parsing from JSON. I would then only use
pattern matching on the instances, never call the "accessor functions" by
themselves, then I get a warning that they're unused which annoys me. But
it's quite unrelated to this mail...

Emmanuel



On Sun, Mar 24, 2013 at 6:34 PM, Gabriel Gonzalez <gabriel439 at gmail.com>wrote:

> **
> Assume you have the following type:
>
> data Type = T { field1 :: String, field2 :: Double }
>
> ... and you want to export the type `Type` and the acessors `field1` and
> `field2`, but not the constructor `T`, then you would write:
>
> module MyModule (
>     Type(field1, field2)
>     ) where
>
> Another way to do this is like so:
>
> module MyModule (
>     Type,
>     field1,
>     field2
>     ) where
>
> That's perfectly legal, too.
>
> Normally, when you write something like:
>
> module MyModule (
>     Type(..)
>     ) where
>
> the ".." expands out to:
>
> module MyModule (
>     Type(T, field1, field2)
>     ) where
>
> All the first solution does is just leave out the T constructor from those
> exports.
>
>
> On 03/24/2013 09:14 AM, Emmanuel Touzery wrote:
>
>  hi,
>
>  i was looking at the response type in http-streams:
>
> http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/http-streams/0.4.0.0/doc/html/Network-Http-Client.html#t:Response
>
>  I'm used that simply the data type and all its "members" are visible --
> the functions to access its contents. But in this case on the HTML
> documentation the response type looks like it has no members. And the
> author has defined like "public accessors" later in the code:
>
> getStatusCode :: Response -> StatusCode
> getStatusCode = pStatusCode
>
> So I'm not even sure how he achieved that the members are not visible,
> the data are exported with (..) as is usually done... And the other thing
> is why
> would you do that.. You could name the member getStatusCode in the first
> place, but then it might increase encapsulation to hide it (depending on
> how he
> managed to hide the members).. But did you then make
> it impossible to deconstruct a Response through pattern matching? That
> sounds like a minus... Although pattern matching on a data with 6 fields
> is always going to be a pain and decreasing the chances for modifying
> the data type without breaking compatibility.
>
>  These "members" are also causing me problems in other situations, for
> instance I have some cases when I use a data type only a few times and with
> -Wall the compiler tells me I don't use the accessor; in fact I read that
> value from the data, but through pattern matching/deconstruction only, not
> through that particular function. I'm thinking to try to hide the warning
> as I think my code is correct.
>
> Anyway I'm curious on the mechanism used by that library... I've already
> noticed a few nice tricks in this library, like a small state monad to take
> optional parameters, much more elegant than any other mechanism i've seen
> so far to achieve the same effect.
>
>  Thank you!
>
> Emmanuel
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Beginners mailing listBeginners at haskell.orghttp://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/beginners
>
>
>
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