[Haskell-cafe] Design your modules for qualified import

[Johan Tibell]

On Sat, Jun 7, 2008 at 3:03 PM, Dan Doel <dan.doel at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Friday 06 June 2008, Andrew Coppin wrote:
>> It's really quite frustrating that it is 100% impossible to write a
>> single function that will process lists, arrays, sets, maps, byte
>> strings, etc. You have to write several different versions. OK, so some
>> functions really don't make sense for a set because it's unordered, and
>> some functions don't make sense for a map, and so forth. But for
>> example, if I write some complicated algorithm that uses a list to store
>> data and I change that to a set instead, I now have to wade through the
>> function changing every operation from a list-op into a set-op. It's
>> really very annoying!
>
> It's not 100% impossible, depending on what exactly you're doing. For
> instance...
>
>  Set a, ByteStrings, Seq a, Map k a and [a] are Monoids
>  Set, Array i, Map k, Tree, Seq and [] are Foldable functors
>  Array i, Map k, Tree, Seq, Tree and [] are Traversable functors
>
> Those can get you lots of operations (folds, maps, unions...) although there
> may be gaps that could be filled (Foldable is sufficient to define null, for
> instance, but it isn't in Data.Foldable).

These do help in the case you want to traverse data structures that
share a set of properties (e.g. are Functors). However, it doesn't
address the problem of sharing an interface among Set, IntSet,
ByteSet, etc. In other words there's a need for a Set type class.
Hopefully type families will help us write such an interface and keep
it efficient.

Cheers,

Johan