[Haskell-cafe] Passing Constructors as arguments

[Daniel Fischer]

Am Mittwoch, 13. April 2005 17:14 schrieben Sie:
> Thanks for your help Daniel - I am clarifying my message
>
> I would like to see an example of passing constructors as arguments. I
>
> am still getting familiar with constructs like:
>  > getProperty ( a -> b) -> [ContactProperty] -> b
>
> I am not sure how to test the Constructor passed as the argument. Do I

This isn't an argument, by the way, it's a parameter.
>
> say the following:
>  > getProperty c ((c v:_) = v
>  > getProperty c ((_:xs) = getProperty c xs

You can't do it thus, a variable-pattern like c may only appear once in a 
function definition and "c v" isn't a legal pattern, so may not appear on the 
lhs of the definition. Neither may an incompletely applied constructor:

Hugs mode: Restart with command line option +98 for Haskell 98 mode

ERROR "./Ini.hs":29 - Constructor "Left" must have exactly 1 argument in 
pattern

The offending line is

humm Left = LT

You can achieve your goal with dummy values:

getProperty c@(FN d) (x:xs) = case x of
                                                  FN fn -> fn
                                                   _       -> getProperty c xs
getProperty c@(LN d) (x:xs) = case x of
                                                   LN ln -> ln
                                                   _       -> getProperty c xs
...

and then call 

getProperty (FN undefined) list.

This isn't very nice, though. I'd rather do it (if labelled records aren't the 
thing to do) using Maybe types:

firstName :: ContactProperty -> Maybe FirstName
firstName (FN fn) = Just fn
firstName _         = Nothing

and so on, then (this depends on all properties being represented by a String, 
if different types were involved, it'd be more complicated)

getProperty :: (ContactProperty -> Maybe String) -> [ContactProperty]
                                                                     -> String
getProperty f xs = case catMaybes $ map f xs of
                                  [] -> "unknown"
                                  (p:ps) -> p

However, this isn't nice either.


>
> ..
>
> I have tried doing this but GHC gives me parse errors. There is  Haskell
> syntax that I don't know yet that I need to learn.

Quite natural, I strongly recommend reading the 'Gentle Introduction to 
Haskell' and every now and then looking whether you already know enough 
Haskell to profit by reading the report. The sections on pattern matching 
have valuable information on the problem at hand.
>
> >As a wild guess, maybe you should use labelled records,
> >
> >data Contact = Contact
> >                     { firstName :: FirstName
> >                     , lastName :: LastName
> >                     , ...
> >                     }
> >
> >and you have your selector-functions.
>
> thanks - very useful
>
Nice to read that :-)

Cheers,
Daniel