[Haskell-cafe] ANN: text 0.5, a major revision of the Unicode text library

[Jeremy Shaw]

Based on section 5.2 of this paper:

http://www.cs.vu.nl/boilerplate/gmap2.pdf

I wonder if the Data instance I provided is the best possible option  
with out modifying SYB. And that the optimal solution would be to  
extend ConstrRep to support Text as a primitive:

data ConstrRep
= AlgConstr ConIndex
| IntConstr Integer
| FloatConstr Double
| StringConstr String
| TextConstr Text -- does not really exist
-- Defined in Data.Data

With the unfortunate side-effect of making syb depend on text.

- jeremy

On Oct 9, 2009, at 2:17 PM, Bryan O'Sullivan wrote:

> On Fri, Oct 9, 2009 at 8:33 AM, Jeremy Shaw <jeremy at n-heptane.com>  
> wrote:
>
> What are the chances of seeing a, instance Data Text, some day?
>
> I might as well follow up here, since I've sent Jeremy a couple of  
> messages on this subject.
>
> I think maybe someone else will have to take a crack at a Data  
> instance for Text, because the documentation for Data.Data is not  
> written in English. In its syntax and structure, it closely hews to  
> what we think of as English, but it is the kind of documentation  
> that can only be understood by someone who already knows what it is  
> going to say.
>
> This is an exemplar of my experience with the cottage industry of  
> generic programming in Haskell: I'd really quite like to use the  
> stuff, but for goodness's sake, o beloved researchers, please aim  
> your expository papers at non-specialists once in a while. An  
> endless chain of papers of the form "my technique, which you won't  
> understand, is better than this other technique, which you haven't  
> read about and won't anyway understand, in subtle ways that you  
> won't understand" does not feel to me like progress.
>
> Yours in some misery and frustration,
> Bryan.

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