[Haskell-cafe] Type classes, collections, sum types, closures, and a massive headache

[Bob Hutchison]

Hi,

I'm relatively new to Haskell, and consider myself to be towards the beginner side of the scale. Nevertheless, I've got this Haskell program I've been working on that's sitting around 11k lines right now. The pattern has been to let it grow to then knock it back by 'refactoring' or whatever you want to call it… doing it right the second time maybe… or the third time. All I want to get across is that though I consider myself a Haskell beginner I've still managed to produce something that is actually quite complex and of reasonable size in about three months.

I'm still getting caught by stuff that I should not be caught by.

So.

Today I thought it was about time to simplify how new 'things' of a certain kind are added to the system. These things are some a cross between an event and an assertion of a fact in a rule based system. There are many different kinds of these things. I already have more than a dozen commonplace ones, and I expect there's a much larger number of more specialized ones that a user will want to add on their own. While they start out quite differently, they end up satisfying a common interface and follow the identical three or four state lifecycle. This sounded like a type class to me, and in fact, easily implemented as such.

Now, this is how I got caught: it seems to be impossible to have collections of things with a common type class if they have different types. How is it that I've written that many lines of code in Haskell and I'm just noticing this now? (If I wasn't so annoyed, I'd look for something clever to reflect how loc count obviously doesn't mean much… but clever seems to be beyond me today).

Is this true? Are there any GHC extensions that will let me around this?

The immediate problem is mapping an input to the system, some json message containing a reference to the 'thing' (like a key of some kind). I have to take that reference and find the thing and operate on it. All operations are easily accommodated by a type class. However, since I can't have a collection with mixed types even if the types satisfy a type class, I can't quite see how to actually store the things so I can find them.

So there are a couple of obvious ways to handle this.

I could use an ADT and a sum type of all the known kinds of thing, but I already know that this has to be extended and that's going to be problematic with users doing this on their own. And the type signatures look ugly. So I think that's not the best.

I could use an ADT that contains functions that correspond to the functions of the type class, and that close over the 'thing' in question. I think this could be made to work, but I'm concerned with walking into more nasty surprises…

If anyone is able to make sense of what I wrote and has any suggestions I'd really appreciate hearing them.

Thanks,
Bob