[Haskell-cafe] Some thoughts on Type-Directed Name Resolution

[AntC]

Donn Cave <donn <at> avvanta.com> writes:

> 
> You can find stuff like "fromIntegral.ord" in
> packages downloaded to build cabal-install for example.  It graphically
> appeals to the notion of a function composed of several functions, so
> the programmers in question will likely not even be repentant!

    Data.Char.toUpper       -- a name composed of several names
    shape.position.xCoord   -- a structure composed of several structures

Here's an off-the-wall idea for the syntactics:
- Where there's a block of names with dot separators (and no spaces).
- The dots must be either all postfix apply or all prefix compose.
- Postpone analysing until we've got some type info for the sub-names.
- The types must interlock either left-to-right or right-to-left.
  So now we know whether we're prefix or postfix.
- Then we can adjust the AST for loose-binding vs tight-binding.
  (As happens for operator precedence.)

?Do we call this "Type-Directed Syntax Resolution" ;-)

(By the way, natural languages do this sort of stuff all the time. In fact 
they revel in it:
   "Eighth Army Push Bottles Up German Rear."
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3708  )


The more I think about it, the more the pseudo-fields makes sense, the more I 
want field selectors to be just functions. There's an interesting example in 
Wadler's original paper that became View Patterns "Views: A way for pattern 
matching to cohabit with data abstraction" [1987], 4. "Viewing a complex 
number in cartesian and polar coordinates".

We may want our implementation of complex to be abstract. We provide (pseudo-) 
fields to select the coordinates. Then they're ever-so like methods for an 
(abstract) object.

Also we want the (pseudo-) fields to be updatable, which means field update 
needs to be polymorphic (overloaded). Then all I need is a type-(or kind-) 
level 'peg' for the name, and an instance for Has/get/set.

AntC