[Haskell-cafe] Byte Histogram

Johan Tibell johan.tibell at gmail.com
Tue Feb 8 08:10:07 CET 2011


On Mon, Feb 7, 2011 at 11:57 PM, John Lato <jwlato at gmail.com> wrote:
> I think the real problem we have with container classes has a lot more to do
> with what we would use them for.  That is, Haskell already has Monoid,
> Foldable and Traversable.  These three (especially Foldable) cover nearly
> everything OOP programmers would expect out of generic container operations.

Unfortunately using e.g. Foldable hurts performance a lot. We need to
look into inlining and specialization and move some functions (e.g.
foldl') into the type class if we want acceptable performance.

> What's missing are classes for specific data types.  That is, a Map/Dict
> interface, a Queue interface, and a Heap interface (probably others too, but
> these are the first that come to mind).  But the standard Data.Map and List
> (for a queue) seem good enough for most people, so there seems to be a lot
> of inertia to overcome for these to be popular.

I think the missing piece to make this abstraction worthwhile is a
second Map/Dict type worth using. Then there's a point in abstracting
over which type is actually used. In most OOP languages the two map
types are sorted and hashed maps.

Johan



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