[Haskell-cafe] memoizing with a default

[Michael George]

I've come across a slight variant of memoization and I'm curious if 
either there is a better way to think about (I have yet to reach Haskell 
Enlightement), or if it's been thought about before.

I'm writing a program that does DFA minimization, as described here: 
https://www.tutorialspoint.com/automata_theory/dfa_minimization.htm.

For me, the simplest way to understand the algorithm is we form an 
equivalence relation, where two states are different if either one is 
final and the other isn't, or if there are transitions from them to 
states that are different.

different a b = isFinal a && not (isFinal b) || isFinal b && not 
(isFinal a) || exists chars (\c -> different (step a c) (step b c))

This definition diverges; it never decides that two states are the same. 
  The standard algorithm builds a table, starting with the assumption 
that all states are the same, and iteratively applying this definition 
until it converges.

I'm thinking of that algorithm as a memoized version of the 
implementation of different above.  But it's not quite:

different = memoFix2 different' where
    different' different'' a b = isFinal a && not (isFinal b) || isFinal 
b && not (isFinal a) || exists chars (\c -> different'' (step a c) (step 
b c))

for the same reason; it diverges.  But with memoization I can detect the 
diversion by putting a marker in the memo table.  If the computation 
makes a recursive call on an input that is started but not computed, 
then (in this case) I want to return false.

In general, I think what I want is

memoFixWithDefault :: (a -> b) -> ((a->b) -> (a -> b)) -> (a -> b)

Where (memoFixWithDefault default f) is like (memoFix f) except that if 
(memoFix f a) would loop, then (memoFixWithDefault default f a) = default a.


I suspect there's a nice denotational way of describing this, but my 
denotational semantics is rusty (maybe it's the least fixed point of f 
that is greater than g or something, but that's not it).  I suspect that 
there needs to be a nice relationship between f and g for 
memoFixWithDefault f g to be sensible.  I also suspect that there's a 
cute 3-line implementation like all the other implementations of memoize 
out there, but I don't see it.  I also suspect that depth-first search 
has a cute implementation using this combinator.

So I was wondering if other people had thoughts or references before I 
went off and thought about it.

Thanks!

-M