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

[Auke Booij]

I have found a way to do this which is good enough for my purposes -
attached. I suspect this could also be modified to use Sergey's Fix
trick for code deduplication

On 3 January 2017 at 00:08, Sergey Vinokurov <serg.foo at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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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