[Haskell-cafe] Extensible records & mandatory/optional record fields

[Harendra Kumar]

Hi Anthony,

Please see my comments below.

On 16 February 2017 at 02:31, Anthony Clayden <anthony_clayden at clear.net.nz>
wrote:

> > On Tue, 14 Feb 2017 at 18:50, Harendra Kumar said:
>
> Hi Harendra. I believe rawr builds on some of the work in
> 'overloaded records'.
>

I am aware of the ghc "overloaded records" proposal. rawr provides
anonymous extensible records using the overloaded labels feature of ghc 8.
Records can be merged or partitioned. I believe, the key difference between
"overloaded records" and rawr is that the latter provides extensible
records while the former does not. Though overloaded records can match a
record based on the fields it contains.


>
> It's not clear what you're trying to do.
> Do you need anonymous/extensible records?
>

I am trying to write a program which provides a friendly high level DSL to
the user. I want a pure function like API but instead of passing positional
parameters I want the user to be able to specify arguments based on
keywords and be able to skip any optional arguments. Something like the
following, name is mandatory and email is optional:

maintainer  (#name  := "Harendra Kumar",  #email := "xyz at gmail.com")

I can achieve this using rawr. The argument to the function is an anonymous
record and we can pattern match partially using the mandatory fields in the
record to statically check that those fields are present. The optional
fields are then supplied by applying the user supplied record on a default
record. Here is a full working program for this example (you will need the
latest rawr from github):

{-# LANGUAGE FlexibleContexts    #-}
{-# LANGUAGE DataKinds #-}
{-# LANGUAGE OverloadedLabels #-}
{-# LANGUAGE ScopedTypeVariables#-}
{-# LANGUAGE TypeOperators#-}

import Data.Rawr

pr t = print $
    case (R t) of
        r@(P (_ := name :: "name" := String)) -> R (#email := "
default at gmail.com") :<= r

main = do
    -- both name and email are specified by the user.
    pr (#name  := "Harendra Kumar",  #email := "xyz at gmail.com")

    -- only name is supplied by the user, the default value of the optional
field "email" will be used
    pr (#name  := "Harendra Kumar")

    -- This will not compile since name is a mandatory field
    -- pr  (#email := "xyz at gmail.com")


I am pretty sure that I am not writing python code in Haskell I was only
trying to say that this is a pretty useful feature in python and I guess in
some other imperative languages too. It allows you to write self
documenting code where necessary. It will be nice if we have a way to
achieve something like this.



> >Like
>
>     data MyR = MyR { a :: Int, b :: String };
>
> If you want default values:
>
>     myRdef = MyR{ a = 0 };  -- don't have to give b
>
> Then bind some value, to incorp defaults.
>
>     r = myRdef { b = "hello" };   -- takes the defult for a
>
>
This is the first approach that I tried, this is commonly used in many
libraries. The only drawback with this is that I cannot enforce
mandatory/optional fields statically. All fields are optional in this case.

-harendra
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