[Haskell-cafe] A practical Haskell puzzle

[wren ng thornton]

On 2/28/11 2:43 AM, Yitzchak Gale wrote:
> You have written a large software system in Haskell. Wishing to
> play to Haskell's strength, you have structured your system
> as a series of composable layers. So you have data types
>
> Layer1, Layer2, ...
>
> and functions
>
> layer2 :: Layer1 ->  Layer2
> layer3 :: Layer2 ->  Layer3
> ...
>
> etc.

Assuming you actually name them Layer1, Layer2, etc, or use any other 
regular naming scheme, you can break apart the names and use typeclasses 
to help out:

     type family Layer :: * -> *
     data Z
     data S n

     class Layerable n where
         layer :: Layer n -> Layer (S n)

Then it's just a matter of getting the right number of them, a la 
lifting through monad transformer stacks. Of course, from here it's not 
that hard to add in some type hackery to do the lifting for you, a la 
"Data types a la Carte"[1]. It's not the cleanest thing ---there's a 
good deal of boilerplate up front--- but once it's set up, it should 
Just Work(tm).


[1] http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~wss/Publications/DataTypesALaCarte.pdf


-- 
Live well,
~wren