[Haskell-cafe] Thoughts on program annotations.

[wren ng thornton]

On 3/4/11 2:32 PM, Jason Dusek wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 4, 2011 at 07:01, wren ng thornton<wren at freegeek.org>  wrote:
>> where the annotation of MergeAnn is merged with the previous
>> annotation up the tree (via mappend), thus allowing for
>> annotations to be inherited and modified incrementally based
>> on the Monoid instance; whereas the NewAnn constructor uses
>> the annotation directly, overriding any contextual
>> annotations. This can be helpful to reduce the amount of
>> duplication in the AST, though how helpful will depend on how
>> you plan to use/generate the ASTs.
>
>    To handle this situation, I thought I'd leave it in the hands
>    of the user (who will be me later) to use Data.Foldable.fold
>    (or not) to arrive at the annotation when building up their
>    tree of statements. I don't anticipate a problem with this but
>    I may not use monoidal annotations on this AST for some time.
>    (I anticipate using comments and raw text inclusions in the
>    near future.)

That could be a workable solution. The tricky thing is that sometimes 
you want to mix the monoidal merge behavior of the annotation with the 
monoidal override behavior I mentioned, and it can get ugly to do that 
in one monoid. Whenever dealing with problems like this I often find 
myself running into semirings-- i.e., two monoids that interact in a 
sensible way. If you'll be wanting a semiring then the Foldable solution 
doesn't work very well. Again, it depends on what exactly you're 
planning to do with these ASTs.

-- 
Live well,
~wren