[Haskell-cafe] Simulating OO programming with type classes; writing a factory fu nction

[Bayley, Alistair]

I've been experimenting with simulating OO programming in Haskell (why, you
might ask? Because I'm trying to port a non-trivial piece of software, and I
want to respect the original design, at least to begin with). I've been
trying the technique illustrated by Ralf Laemmel:
  http://homepages.cwi.nl/~ralf/OOHaskell/src/interpreter/extensible.hs

There's a small problem: how to write a factory function that returns values
of various subtypes. The makeSubType function below won't compile, obviously
because the returns types are different (they're not the same 'm'). I
realise that I'm looking for something that Haskell doesn't natively do, so
my question is: is there some kind of workaround that'll give me the ability
to write factory functions?

(No doubt there's some obvious trick that I've missed :-)

I'm aware of http://homepages.cwi.nl/~ralf/OOHaskell/ , which will be my
technique of last resort. I was fond of Ralf's extensible interpreter
example because it's quite lightweight, but if there's no way around the
factory problem, so be it.

Alistair.


-------------------------------------------
-- Toy OO example with subtyping

module Main where

main = print "boo"

-- class to represent OO base class
class BaseClass c

-- each subtype of BaseClass is a separate datatype
data SubBase1 = SubBase1 Int
data BaseClass c => SubBase2 c = SubBase2 c

instance BaseClass SubBase1
instance BaseClass (SubBase2 c)


-- methods of BaseClass defined with new class

class BaseClass c => Method c where
  -- illegal: can't return values of type c; can only consume them
  method1 :: c -> Int -> c
  method2 :: c -> Int

-- install each subtype (datatype) as instance of Method

instance Method SubBase1 where
  method1 _ i = SubBase1 i
  method2 (SubBase1 i) = i

instance Method c => Method (SubBase2 c) where
  -- This one fails, because must return polymorphic value, not concrete
  --method1 _ i = SubBase2 (SubBase1 5)
  method1 x i = x
  method2 x = 2

-- Also, cannot make factory function:

--makeSubType :: (Method m) => String -> m
makeSubType s =
  if s == "SubBase1"
  then SubBase1 3
  else SubBase2 (SubBase1 4)

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