[Haskell-cafe] How to give unique name/id to nodes outside any monad ?

[Lennart Augustsson]

Of course you don't need a monad, but you need to do the same
operations as you would with a state monad to number the nodes.  This
is the only way in (pure) Haskell.  There is no object identity in
Haskell, so if you want the nodes to have identity you need to provide
it.

GHC does have a library for stable names which (in the IO monad)
allows you to get something akin to the address of a value in memory.
But that's not the functional way of doing this.

  -- Lennart

On Thu, Jan 8, 2009 at 9:28 AM, minh thu <noteed at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'd like to process some kind of graph data structure,
> say something like
>
> data DS = A [DS] | B DS DS | C.
>
> but I want to be able to discover any sharing.
> Thus, in
>
> b = B a a where a = A [C],
>
> if I want to malloc a similar data structure,
> I have to handle to the node representing B
> two times the same pointer (the one returned
> after allocating A [C]).
>
> To discover sharing, I thought it would be
> necessary to give unique name to node and
> then compare them while traversing the graph.
> I could give the name by hand but it would be
> cumbersome. But at least it would not require
> any monad for the bookkeeping of ungiven
> names. Is it possible to give those names
> automatically but outside any monad ?
>
> Thanks,
> Thu
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