[Haskell-cafe] Announcing OneTuple-0.1.0

[John Dorsey]

All,

I'm bundling responses to save paper.

ajb at spamcop.net wrote:
> I hope it has a Monad instance.

Naturally!

> But more to the point: Can it send email?

Can you give an example of a use case?  Do the Haskell-98 standard
tuples have a correspondence feature?  I wasn't able to find one with
Hoogle.

Simon Brenner wrote:
> You could always use this one-tuple instead and get Functor, Monad and
> MonadFix for free:

As Luke pointed out, that one seems to be too strict.  It may simplify
the strict implementation, though.  The initial release did have Monad
and Functor instances... I'll look into MonadFix (thanks!).

Luke Palmer wrote:
> Hmm, it looks like you forgot to write a Traversable instance.

Oops... I included the instance statement but retained the default,
mutually recursive methods.  Too bad GHC didn't warn me.  (Pesky
halting problem.)  Your change is in 0.1.1 -- thanks!

Benjamin L.Russell wrote:
> Wonderful!  I'm intrigued....

Thank you.

> What is the syntax for the singleton tuple?  [...]  What is your
> solution?

Haskell has no such syntax, of course.  '(x)' is no good due to
ambiguity with parens' usual associative use.  '(x,)' has been
discussed, I think.  It's ugly; it's inconsistent with other tuples,
which don't share its final comma; it looks a bit like a tuple section,
which could cause confusion.

My solution was to use a normal Algebraic Data Type:
    data OneTuple a = OneTuple a

I think the need for singleton tuples is rare enough that the
syntactic inconsistency is tolerable.

Jon Fairbairn suggests using unicode 0x27e8 and 0x27e0 in place of
parentheses for tuples.  I like the idea, especially as an alternate
syntax for the same tuple types, permitting the singleton.

minh thu writes:
> I thought to this idea in another way : parenthesis could be used for
> s-expressions and [unicode 0x27e8 and 0x27e0] could be used for
> regular grouping. This would allow to switch in the same code between
> infix and s-expr (e.g. enabling SXML)...

I don't think I fully understand your proposal, although it sounds
interesting.

Regards,
John Dorsey