[Haskell-cafe] Functors and the Visitor Pattern

[Edward Kmett]

The concepts are fairly closely related but each entails something the other
does not. Functor entails parametric polymorphism with respect to the
contents of the container. And a visitor can extract a result from the
traversal.

As a result you may want to think in terms of a Traversable or Foldable
functor rather than just a Functor. These will let you extract a monadic or
applicative result from your container.

Now, as for your actual question, Applicative functors are really hard to
model in other languages. With C++ templates you can probably get a weak
approximation with something like the encoding used here, possibly mixed
with some boost magic for a usable function type:

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/8bx33/a_comparison_of_c_concepts_and_haskell_type/

But I can't think of anyone that would try to use it in production code,
and there are many common idioms that that style of translation can't
account for (i.e. polymorphic recursion).

-Edward Kmett

On Wed, Jun 3, 2009 at 9:10 AM, Tom.Amundsen <tomamundsen at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> So, last night, I was having this problem with my Java code where I
> couldn't
> figure out for the life of me how to write a piece of code without a big if
> {} else if {} else if {} ... else {} structure. I was Googling "Java
> Reflection" to try to determine how to "cast to the most concerete subclass
> at runtime." Then it dawned on me that what I was trying to do has already
> been solved by using the Visitor design pattern.
>
> Then, after reading the Visitor design pattern page on Wiki, it said that
> the visitor pattern is essentially an implementation of a functor. Aha! It
> totally clicked. The Visitor pattern allows you to collect code for similar
> operations, while spreading apart code for similar objects. Now that really
> sounds like a functor!
>
> Although, now I'm second guessing myself, because I can't figure out how we
> could create some design pattern that simulates an applicative functor. I'm
> pretty sure the Visitor pattern doesn't take you this far (but I am willing
> to be corrected). So, is there a way to create applicative functors in
> non-functional languages? What would that pattern look like?
>
> - Tom
> --
> View this message in context:
> http://www.nabble.com/Functors-and-the-Visitor-Pattern-tp23851113p23851113.html
> Sent from the Haskell - Haskell-Cafe mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
>
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