Library function discovery (was: "listProduct" -- is this a standard function?)

[Graham Klyne]

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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