[Haskell-cafe] writing graphs with do-notation

[Soenke Hahn]

Hi!

Some time ago, i needed to write down graphs in Haskell. I wanted to be able 
to write them down without to much noise, to make them easily maintainable. I 
came up with a way to define graphs using monads and the do notation. I thought 
this might be interesting to someone, so i wrote a small script to illustrate 
the idea. Here's an example:

example :: Graph String
example = buildGraph $ do
    a <- mkNode "A" []
    b <- mkNode "B" [a]
    mkNode "C" [a, b]

In this graph there are three nodes identified by ["A", "B", "C"] and three 
edges ([("A", "B"), ("A", "C"), ("B", "C")]). Think of the variables a and b 
as outputs of the nodes "A" and "B". Note that each node identifier needs to be 
mentioned only once. Also the definition of edges (references to other nodes 
via the outputs) can be checked at compile time.

The attachment is a little script that defines a Graph-type (nothing 
elaborate), the "buildGraph" function and an example graph that is a little 
more complex than the above. The main function of the script prints the 
example graph to stdout to be read by dot (or similar).

By the way, it is possible to define cyclic graphs using mdo (RecursiveDo).

I haven't come across something similar, so i thought, i'd share it. What do 
you think?

Sönke
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