Polymorphic lists...

[MR K P SCHUPKE]

This is the latest varient. Let me know whether you guys find this
interesting, as I am coding what I need for a practical application,
it may be tedious for you... I am still of the opinion that some
kind of polygenious list (or maybe heteromorphic?) would be good in
the standard libraries, whether it my code, someone elses or some
combination.

My initial feeling would be to standardise our function , class and
type naming so the different kinds of list/set can be put into the
same codebase, possibly aimed at being Data.PolyLists, also what is
required to get these in the library - just the code, neat code,
a report, or some kind of proposal ?


infixr 1 `MCons`
data MNil = MNil deriving Show
data MCons l a r = a `MCons` r deriving Show

class MRelation r
instance MRelation MNil
instance MRelation r => MRelation (MCons l a r)


This is a labelled list. It uses a phantom type to label
each node, but it theoretically needs no storage for the label...

Standard list functions operate as before, and ignore the phantom
type.


class MRelation r => MList r where
   mHead :: MCons l a r -> a
   mTail :: MCons l a r -> r
   mIsEmpty :: r -> Bool
instance MList MNil where
   mHead (x `MCons` _) = x
   mTail (_ `MCons` _) = MNil
   mIsEmpty MNil = True
instance MList r => MList (MCons l a r) where
   mHead (x `MCons` _) = x
   mTail (_ `MCons` xs) = xs
   mIsEmpty (_ `MCons` _) = False


I have the usual suspects fold/map/zip/unzip, and natural
number lookup coded. This is the nice touch though, an indexed
lookup on the phatom type, which finds the Nth occurance of a
given type in the list:


class (MRelation r,Nat n) => MLookup l n r a | l n r -> a where
   mLookup :: r -> l -> n -> a
instance MRelation r => MLookup l Zero (MCons l a r) a where
   mLookup (x `MCons` _) _ Zero = x
instance MLookup l n r b => MLookup l (Suc n) (MCons l a r) b where
   mLookup (_ `MCons` xs) l (Suc n) = mLookup xs l n
instance MLookup l n r b => MLookup l n (MCons m a r) b where
   mLookup (_ `MCons` xs) l n = mLookup xs l n



heres an example:



data Name = Name
data Size = Size
data Weight = Weight

test = MCons Name String
	(MCons Size Int
	(MCons Weight Float
	MNil))
test = "Box" `MCons` 3 `MCons` 1.1

putStrLn $ show $ mLookup test Name zero
putStrLn $ show $ mLookup test Size zero
putStrLn $ show $ mLookup test Weight zero

putStrLn $ show $ mLookup (test `mProduct` test) Name one 
putStrLn $ show $ mLookup (test `mProduct` test) Weight zero



These last two show how to access the labels from the right
and left sides of the product when some/all domains have the
same name.


	Regards,
	Keean.