[Haskell-cafe] Dynamic choice of "reverse" implementation

[Brian Hulley]

Brian Hulley wrote:
> Krzysztof Kościuszkiewicz wrote:
>> So the type of mapM_ used in the code is
>> (Foldable t, Monad m) => (a -> m b) -> t a -> m ()
>>
>> I'd like to keep the generic Foldable t there when "m" is specialized 
>> to IO.
>> I thought this would allow type of "reversor" to be specialized to
>> (Foldable f) => [String] -> f String
>>   ... I'd like to avoid [a] -> something -> [a]
>
> Yes this type should be fine.

I should have said though that in your code, because one arm of the case 
construct returns Data.List.reverse, the type of reversor is fixed to 
[a] -> [a].

The other arm of the case construct could make use of a more general 
function eg

    reverseFoldable :: (Foldable f, Foldable g) => f a -> g a

but it would only be used at f == [], g == [].

So in terms of the command line test harness, I think the only way is to 
explicitly choose the foldable you want to try out eg by using 
(Foldable.toList . Seq.reverse . Seq.fromList) etc.

An alternative might be to just write some different implementations of 
reverse functions in a module then load the module into ghci to test 
them out interactively so their types don't get unified with each other.

Brian.