[Haskell-cafe] Mapping Haskell Concepts To C# 3

[Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH]

On 2008 May 18, at 9:59, Kaveh Shahbazian wrote:

> For something like: type Thing a b = ThisWay a | ThatWay b | NoWay  
> actually there is no equivalents for data constructor

I presume you mean "data" instead of "type".  Not that I can address  
your question directly, as I don't know C#.  In C it's a union; in C++  
you would export constructors ThisWay(), ThatWay(), NoWay() from class  
Thing.  I presume C# is similar.  Haskell syntax is decidedly more  
compact than any of them.

> in C# 3 (I think). I asked it if there are other ideas about this:  
> Controlling the execution path by deciding based of structure of  
> data with a trick other than reflecting!

in C-like languages, the class includes a structure tag which is set  
by the constructor.  Guess what?  That's how Haskell does it, just  
implicitly (hence, again, nicely compact syntax).  (You can actually  
experiment with this in GHC; using internal stuff like UnsafeCoerce#  
you can coerce one datum to another if they have the same (0-based,  
assigned in order of definition) constructor tag and the same  
representation for the data value.  IIRC in GHC the internal  
constructor tag is an 8-bit unsigned value.)

To make the above a bit clearer (I hope), here's a rough C  
approximation of a simple Haskell type:

     /* data Foo = FooInt Int | FooDouble Double */

     struct Foo {
       unsigned char _FooTag;
       union {
     #define _FooTag_FooInt 0
         int _FooInt;
     #define _FooTag_FooDouble 1
         double _FooDouble;
       } _Foo_u;
     };

     /* here I assume unboxed basic types for simplicity */
     struct Foo *FooInt(int param) {
       Foo *foo = malloc(sizeof *foo); /* assume sane error checking  
here */
       foo->_FooTag = _FooTag_FooInt;
       foo->_Foo_u._FooInt = param;
     }

     struct Foo *FooDouble(int param) {
       Foo *foo = malloc(sizeof *foo); /* assume sane error checking  
here */
       foo->_FooTag = _FooTag_FooDouble;
       foo->_Foo_u._FooDouble = param;
     }

     /*
      *   bar (FooInt i) = ...
      * desugars to
      *   bar x = case x of { FooInt i -> ... }
      * 	which is very roughly (pretend I catch x == 0 and invoke  
error("Undefined"))
      *   bar(Foo x) { switch (x->_FooTag) { case _FooTag_FooInt: i =  
x->_Foo_u._FooInt; ... } }
      */

-- 
brandon s. allbery [solaris,freebsd,perl,pugs,haskell] allbery at kf8nh.com
system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] allbery at ece.cmu.edu
electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university    KF8NH


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