[Haskell-cafe] Efficient object identity (aka symbols as data)

[Jacek Generowicz]

[ TLDR: How do you do Lisp symbols in Haskell? ]


What is the Haskell approach to efficient comparison and lookup of  
objects by their identity?

Maybe a toy example would help to explain what I mean.

Imagine that I want to use Haskell to maximize happiness in a  
situation where a bunch of people have to be assigned to certain  
groups according to their preferences, and some constraints on the  
group sizes. Conceptually my input data might be structured as follows:

data Group = Group GroupName MaxGroupSize
data Person = Person Name Group Group Group

The program should partition the people into groups, attempting to get  
everyone into their most favoured groups.

Whatever algorithm I choose to use for the optimization, will have to  
do lots of comparisons of Groups and Persons where their *identity* is  
all that matters: you don't need to look inside the objects. On the  
other hand, sometimes we will have to look inside the objects, for  
example in order to answer queries such as "Which group did Johnny get  
and how far down his list of choices did that group feature?".

I should be able to run the program on data that becomes available at  
run time.

The lisper in me is crying out for (lisp-like-)symbols which I can  
create from the input data at run time and on which some extra  
information can be hung. How would I organize something like this in  
Haskell?


Thanks.