[Haskell-cafe] Why is there no Zippable class? Would this work?

[Janis Voigtlaender]

Why is there no Zippable class? There is.

You can use Data.Zippable from http://hackage.haskell.org/package/bff.

It gives you a function

   tryZip :: Zippable k => k a -> k b -> Either String (k (a,b))

The Either in the return type is to capture an error message in case the
two structures are not of the same shape.

For example, for

   data Tree a = Leaf a | Node (Tree a) (Tree a)

you would have:

   instance Zippable Tree where
      tryZip (Leaf a)     (Leaf b)     = Right (Leaf (a,b))
      tryZip (Node a1 a2) (Node b1 b2) = do z1 <- tryZip a1 b1
                                            z2 <- tryZip a2 b2
                                            return (Node z1 z2)
      tryZip _             _           = Left "Structure mismatch."

Of course, you can get an "unsafe" zip by composing tryZip with a fromRight.

What's more, the mentioned package contains an automatic Template
Haskell deriver for Zippable instances, so you don't have to write the
above instance definition yourself.

The implementation is by Joachim Breitner.

Ciao,
Janis.

-- 
Dr. Janis Voigtlaender
http://wwwtcs.inf.tu-dresden.de/~voigt/
mailto:voigt at tcs.inf.tu-dresden.de