Data.Map/Data.IntMap additional features

[Evan Laforge]

On Tue, Nov 3, 2009 at 12:39 PM, Louis Wasserman
<wasserman.louis at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hey all,
>
> Amid the discussion of inconsistencies between Data.IntMap and Data.Map, I
> thought I'd throw in some more ideas.  I've been working on a rather
> thorough generalized trie map implementation, which has done nothing if not
> force me to make really very generalized signatures for every method offered
> by Data.Map, etc.  Some of these generalizations are, I think, independently
> useful, and I wanted to throw them out for discussion before creating a
> ticket.

It looks really complicated and I don't really understand any of it.
So maybe as a default method for a typeclass that the datatype
designer can implement, but if it were a choice between findMax and
extractWithKey with some Applicative and Monoid and whatever else
magic, I'd use findMax every time :)  I'd be wary of putting anything
difficult to describe in a default interface for a basic data type.

The main functions I use with maps are forward and reverse iteration
(toAscList, toDescList) and splitting, I have split2 defined which is
more useful to me than Map.splitLookup:

-- | Like 'Data.Map.split', except include a matched key in the above map.
split2 :: (Ord k) => k -> Map.Map k a -> (Map.Map k a, Map.Map k a)

And of course creating, inserting, updating, and deleting.  Rarely key
and value mapping.  Any interface that provides those 9 functions will
satisfy all needs I can think of.  If they can all be implemented with
extractWithKey, then great, put that in the class interface and define
the rest with defaulting methods.