Library function discovery (was: "listProduct" -- is this a
standard function?)
Graham Klyne
gk at ninebynine.org
Mon Oct 20 11:08:34 EDT 2003
At 16:38 17/10/03 -0700, Brandon Michael Moore wrote:
>The suggestion of a "types that specialize to/unify with this type" search
>would be really useful.
My main interest in Haskell is as a "scripting language" for semantic web
applications (cf [1] et seq). Your comment suggests a possible application
that might be built from the tools I'm currently developing [4].
I would guess it would be feasible to modify Haddock to generate RDF [2]
descriptions of library functions as an alternative to HTML (or, maybe
better still, generate a form of XHTML with additional embedded markup that
can be used to extract RDF from HTML using a simple XSLT stylesheet, cf. [3]).
It would be an interesting test of my inference toolkit to see if it can
handle the unification required to match function signatures for this; I
think it would be moderately straightforward to do in bare Haskell (not
having to worry too much about language corner cases for such an application).
#g
--
[1] http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell/2003-February/011222.html
-- cites article about what makes a popular language:
http://www.paulgraham.com/popular.html
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-rdf-syntax/
and http://www.w3.org/RDF/
[3] http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/200207/rsscal/xslt-rss-events.html
-- This is an example of using one of several techniques described in:
http://infomesh.net/2002/rdfinhtml/
[4] http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell/2003-June/012013.html
-- Announcing first phase of my Swish software, with links
------------
Graham Klyne
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