Was: [Haskell-cafe] Haskell reference documentation, laws first or laws last?

David Feuer david.feuer at gmail.com
Sun Sep 19 06:49:11 UTC 2021


No, fromList is too much. Consider

data Foo a = Foo (IORef String) [a]
  deriving Foldable

What IORef should fromList use?


On Sun, Sep 19, 2021, 2:44 AM Anthony Clayden <anthony.d.clayden at gmail.com>
wrote:

> (Moving this discussion to glasgow-users. It's just not appropriate on the
> cafe.)
>
>
> > I am no longer a novice, and yet would still have a hard time making
> any use of the laws as written in constructing instances. Instead, I'd ignore
> the laws and write a natural intuitive instance, and it would invariably
> work.
>
> Seems my approach is very similar to Viktor's. My (very informal)
> understanding of the Laws looks nothing like the docos. I regard Foldable
> structures as merely more efficient ways to hold a List. Then I expect
> 'moral equivalences':
>
> > toList . fromList ~=~ id -- going via the Foldable structure
> > fromList . toList ~=~ id
> > toList ~=~ foldr (:) []
>
> But those aren't equalities. 'moral equivalence' means the Lists have the
> same elements, not necessarily in the same order; the structures have the
> same elements but possibly in a different arrangement -- that is, in the
> `Tree` example, there might be `Empty` scattered about, and elements held
> variously in `Leaf`s vs `Node`s. So more accurately:
>
> > fromList . toList . fromList === fromList -- i.e. there's a 'canonical'
> arrangement
> > toList . fromList . toList === toList -- i.e. there's a 'canonical' List
> ordering
>
> (That triple-journey business is a similar style to defining Lattice
> pseudocomplements
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudocomplement#Properties -- if I can
> chuck in some math theory.)
>
> I'd expect all other methods to be one of: `reduceStuff === reduceStuff .
> toList` or `mapStuff === fromList . mapStuff . toList`.
>
> But! there's no method `fromList` in Foldable. Why not?/please explain.
> (Are there Foldable structures which we can't load from a List? At least
> assuming the List is finite.) `fromList` is the first thing I write after
> declaring the datatype, so I can easily load up some test data. There is
> one example `fromList` in the doco. Is that not generalisable? `foldMap
> Leaf` would be brutal, but should work? `foldMap singleton` ? (But there's
> no method `singleton`.)
>
>
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