[Haskell-cafe] How to tie knots in XML-style data structures

[Sergey Vinokurov]

Hi Auke,

> 2. Is there a better way to define the types Blah, Yada, Blah' and
> Yada' (e.g. with less repetition)? After all, all I'm changing is the
> type of one field, but I end up having to redefine all my types.

I think one way to accomplish your task would be to employ functors as basic
building blocks that you can parameterise to express either Blah or Blah' types.

The complete code with my attempt is in the attachment. To get more
information on
Fix type I'd recommend to read on recursion schemes/F-algebras, e.g.
https://github.com/willtim/recursion-schemes/raw/master/slides-final.pdf.

> 1. How can I write a function that takes a Blah, and outputs a Blah',
> and reports a nice error when there is no <blah> with the name
> specified in the <yada>? Can it be done at all without using partial
> functions like fromJust (when using Maybe to "report" errors)?

I included my attempt at defining such function in the attached code.
The idea is that
conversion works in the Either monad that allows to report errors.
Monadic context is
threaded through whole conversion, so if any error occurs it will
appear in the result.
However, the conversion function, resolveYadas, is still pure from the
outside and you
can easily find out whether there were any errors by analyzing the
Either result.

Sample run:
λ> resolveYadas sampleEnv $ BlahF "first" 10 [YadaF "second"]
Right (Fix (C (BlahF {blahName = "first", blahType = 10, blahYadas =
[YadaF {yadaBlah = Fix (C (BlahF {blahName = "second", blahType = 3,
blahYadas = []}))}]})))
λ> resolveYadas sampleEnv $ BlahF "first" 10 [YadaF "third"]
Left "No Blah with name \"third\""

Hope this helps!

Regards,
Sergey
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