[Haskell-cafe] representing spreadsheets

[Alexander Solla]

On Fri, May 27, 2011 at 3:11 PM, Eric Rasmussen <ericrasmussen at gmail.com>
wrote:
Stephen, thanks for the link! The paper was an interesting read and
definitely gave me some ideas.

Tillmann -- you are correct in that it's very similar to a database.

I frequently go through this process:

1) Receive a flat file (various formats) of tabular data
2) Create a model of the data and a parser for the file
3) Code utilities that allow business users to
filter/query/accumulate/compare the files

The models are always changing, so one option would be to inspect a
user-supplied definition, build a SQLite database to match, and use Haskell
to feed in the data and run queries. However, I'm usually dealing with files
that can easily be loaded into memory, and generally they aren't accessed
with enough frequency to justify persisting them in a separate format.

"Worth it" in what terms?  You're either going to have to encode the
relationships yourself, or else automate the process.

It's actually worked fine in the past to code a custom data type with record
syntax (or sometimes just tuples) and simply build a list of them, but the
challenge in taking this to a higher level is reading in a user-supplied
definition, perhaps translated as 'the first column should be indexed by the
string "Purchase amount" and contains a Double', and then performing
calculations on those doubles based on further user input. I'm trying to get
over bad object-oriented habits of assigning attributes at runtime and
inspecting types to determine which functions can be applied to which data,
and I'm not sure what concepts of functional programming better address
these requirements.


My intuition is to use some kind of initial algebra to create a list-like
structure /for each record/  For example, with GADTs:.

data Field a = Field { name  :: String }
data Value a = Value { value :: a }


> Presumably, your data definition will parse
> into:
data RecordScheme where
     NoFields :: RecordScheme
     AddField :: Field a -> RecordScheme -> RecordScheme

> And then, given a record scheme, you can
> construct a Table running the appropriate
> queries for the scheme and Populating its
> Records.

data Record where
     EndOfRecord :: Record
     Populate    :: Value a -> Record -> Record

type Table = [Record]
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