[Haskell-cafe] [Haskell] ANN: syntactic-0.1

[Emil Axelsson]

2011-05-10 15:31, Heinrich Apfelmus skrev:
>>> I'm also unhappy about some of the boilerplate. For instance, have a
>>> look at the function  goE  in  compileAccumB  (line 210), it's just a
>>> generic applicative traversal through the data type.
>>
>> Most likely, this boilerplate could be simplified using syntactic.
>
> Hm, does the boilerplate get removed or only simplified? I was hoping
> that one could use a completely generic traversal; but is that actually
> the case?

I was using careful wording :) I think the traversal can be completely 
generic. But syntactic brings its own (constant) overhead, so I felt the 
word "remove" might be too strong.



> On closer inspection, I'm discovering another issue, namely the need for
> the  Typeable  class. This is quite unfortunate, because it would mean
> that I won't be able to make an API built on type classes like Functor
> or Applicative. Some discussion on that can be found at the end of
>
> http://apfelmus.nfshost.com/blog/2011/04/24-frp-push-driven-sharing.html

Hm... The only reason (afair) for having Typeable constraints in the 
tree was that my code motion transform (not yet released) needs to move 
around nodes in a way that the type checker is not happy with. But as 
long as my algorithm is correct, the type casts will actually always 
succeed. So it might be possible to use unsafeCoerce directly and get 
rid of Typeable. There might also be ways to make Typeable optional...

I will look into this.



> So, it looks like I can't make use of  syntactic  at the moment. Then
> again, my library is probably one of the strongest tests of expressivity
> for  endeavors like  syntactic , so that's fine. Another example of
> similar difficulty would be D. Swierstra's recent parser/grammar
> combinators that can handle left-recursive grammars. Once  syntactic
> can deal with those, you're the king! :)

Thanks for the tip! It would be interesting to try out these libraries 
for real, if only for the sake of getting to know the practical limits 
of syntactic. But my focus is currently on the Feldspar implementation, 
so I probably won't have time for things like this in a (long) while.

/ Emil