[Haskell-cafe] Read instance for constructors?

[Semen Trygubenko / Семен Тригубенко]

On Tue, Mar 11, 2014 at 01:21:01PM +0100, Niklas Haas wrote:
> > Thank you very much — it works! [and many new useful functions discovered along the way :-)].
> > 
> > I'm fairly happy with this solution (using readConstr as suggested by Niklas,
> > and fromConstrB, as per above). The only wrinkle now is with this term in the definition of f :
> > 
> > dataTypeOf $ B 1
> > 
> > We provide a value here (B 1) — is there a way to make it take the constructor (B)
> > instead, or, alternatively, make f aware of the signature of the constructor (Int -> D) and/or the resulting
> > data type (D) somehow? I've hoogled it and also looked through Data.Data with no luck…
> > 
> > It's just that constructing a full-blown value of type D might be non-trivial if D is complex,
> > but it seems a bit wasteful as we are after the outer constructor alone.
> > And of course, if D or types D depends on change we need to modify f…
> > 
> > Thank you,
> > S.
> 
> The idiomatic way to handle this kind of stuff normally is to pass an
> abstract proxy that carries the type as a type argument, rather than
> passing a value of that type itself, eg.:
> 
> > data Proxy a = Proxy
> >
> > dataTypeOf :: Data a => Proxy a -> DataTypeOf
> 
> or even a more polymorphic version:
> 
> > dataTypeOf :: Data a => f a -> DataTypeOf
> 
> which can be instantiated at any ‘f’, including Proxy, [], Maybe or
> others.
> 
> Unfortunately, it does not seem that Data.Data.Data has gone for this
> route, so my feedback is a bit useless. You could still provide your own
> wrapper function (that uses ‘undefined’ internally, which we know here
> to be safe even though it's ugly), though.

Thank you for your reply — I've read it many times, but couldn't translate it into code
as of yet.

I don't mind ugly as long as it's safe.
Specifically, how am I to construct an entity of type DataType (see Data.Data; DataType needs to be fed
into readConstr) with the help of a wrapper function you are describing?

If someone could in the direction of a skeleton for
such a function I might be able to fill in the gaps on my own.
But currently I'm stuck… :/

Thanks again,
S.



-- 
Семен Тригубенко http://trygub.com
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