[Haskell] Long live Edison

[Robert Dockins]

Haskell community,

As many of you are aware, Edison is a venerable library of data  
structures written in Haskell, primarily by Chris Okasaki.  I have  
though for some time that it is a great shame that Edison has been  
languishing in disuse.  It has always seemed to me to be high quality  
code which is fairly well designed.  I believe that the barriers to  
its adoption have largely been barriers of ease-of-use and project  
management, and not necessarily problems with the design or  
implementation of the code itself.

Although I am not a data structures expert, several weeks ago I  
decided that I would try my hand at maintaining Edison and see if I  
could overcome these barriers.  Toward this end I have taken the most  
recent Edison codebase I could find (from Andrew Bromage's HFL  
project) and updated it in the following ways:


-- Put source code under darcs version control
-- Moved modules into a module hierarchy rooted at "Data.Edison"
-- Moved to a cabal build system
-- Integrated documentation into the source code using Haddock
-- Tied together the various unit testing code into a comprehensive  
test suite
-- Altered the API to bring it more closely in line with current  
practice (as exemplified by the Data.Set and Data.Map standard  
libraries)
-- Added Data.Set and Data.Map as Edison "implementations"



I now feel that it is ready for release, and have consequently  
prepared what I am calling "Edison 1.2, release candidate 1".  Before  
I officially dub Edison 1.2, I would like to request some feedback  
from the community.  In particular, I would very much like to hear  
people's opinions about the API: naming conventions, argument orders,  
etc.  I have already made a number of changes to the Edison 1.1 API,  
and if people feel other changes are warranted, I'd like to go ahead  
and make them all at once.

Particular points about which I would like to get feedback are:

-- The Sequence 'rcons' method takes its arguments in the opposite  
order as the 'lcons' method (for mnemonic purposes).  Should the  
arguments to 'rcons' be reversed?
-- There are a few places where 'Data.Map' and/or 'Data.Set' have  
methods named similarly (but not identical) to the Edison API.  By  
and large I have left those differences.  Should I instead modify  
Edison to match those names?
-- Are there additional methods that should be added to the API?
-- Are there methods that should be removed?

And perhaps most important,

-- looking at this version of Edison, are there any things that would  
make you hesitant to use it?



You can find Edison 1.2rc1 at the following places:


Project homepage:
http://www.eecs.tufts.edu/~rdocki01/edison.html

API docs:
http://www.eecs.tufts.edu/~rdocki01/docs/edison/index.html

Darcs repository:
http://www.eecs.tufts.edu/~rdocki01/edison/

Source tarball:
http://www.eecs.tufts.edu/~rdocki01/projects/edison-1.2rc1-source.tar.gz





Many thanks,
Rob Dockins


Speak softly and drive a Sherman tank.
Laugh hard; it's a long way to the bank.
           -- TMBG