ANN: unification-fd 0.10.0

wren romano winterkoninkje at gmail.com
Mon Mar 30 01:12:48 UTC 2015 

--------------------------------------------
-- unification-fd 0.10.0
--------------------------------------------

The unification-fd package offers generic functions for single-sorted
first-order structural unification (think of programming in Prolog, or
of the metavariables in type inference)[1][2]. The library *is*
sufficient for implementing higher-rank type systems a la [Peyton Jones,
Vytiniotis, Weirich, Shields], but bear in mind that unification
variables are the metavariables of type inference--- not the
type-variables. As of this version, the library is also sufficient for
implementing (non-recursive) feature structure unification.

An effort has been made to make the package as portable as possible.
However, because it uses the ST monad and the mtl-2 package it can't be
H98 nor H2010. However, it only uses the following common extensions
which should be well supported[3]:

     Rank2Types
     MultiParamTypeClasses
     FunctionalDependencies -- Alas, necessary for type inference
     FlexibleContexts       -- Necessary for practical use of MPTCs
     FlexibleInstances      -- Necessary for practical use of MPTCs
     UndecidableInstances   -- For Show instances due to two-level types


--------------------------------------------
-- Changes since 0.8.0 (2012-07-11)
--------------------------------------------

* (0.8.1) Added Functor, Foldable, and Traversable instances for
COntrol.Unification.Types.UnificationFailure. Thanks Graham Rogers.

* (0.9.0) Changed the fundeps on BindingMonad and RankedBindingMonad
so that things compule under GHC 7.8.2

* (0.9.0) eta-expanded the rewrite rules in Data.Functor.Fixedpoint so
that GHC 7.8 no longer gives warnings about not firing due to (.)
possibly being inlined first

* Cleaned things up to compile cleanly for GHC 7.10

* For EitherK and MaybeK, liberalized the instances to only require
Applicative instead of Monad wherever possible.

* Completely revamped the old UnificationFailure data type as the new
UFailure data type and Fallible type class. This was necessary to
clean up some deprecation warnings about using Control.Monad.Error, to
remove the hack of needing an UnknownError constructor, and to make
the data type for representing failures more extensible.


--------------------------------------------
-- Description
--------------------------------------------

The unification API is generic in the type of the structures being
unified and in the implementation of unification variables, following
the two-level types pearl of Sheard (2001). This style mixes well with
Swierstra (2008), though an implementation of the latter is not included
in this package.

That is, all you have to do is define the functor whose fixed-point is
the recursive type you're interested in:

     -- The non-recursive structure of terms
     data S a = ...

     -- The recursive term type
     type Term = Fix S

And then provide an instance for Unifiable, where zipMatch performs one
level of equality testing for terms and returns the one-level spine
filled with pairs of subterms to be recursively checked, or Nothing if
this level doesn't match. Each subterm can be separately marked as being
resolved, Left xy, or as requiring further unification, Right(x,y).

     class (Traversable t) => Unifiable t where
         zipMatch :: t a -> t a -> Maybe (t (Either a (a, a)))

The choice of which variable implementation to use is defined by
similarly simple classes Variable and BindingMonad. We store the
variable bindings in a monad, for obvious reasons. In case it's not
obvious, see Dijkstra et al. (2008) for benchmarks demonstrating the
cost of naively applying bindings eagerly.

There are currently two implementations of variables provided: one based
on STRefs, and another based on a state monad carrying an IntMap. The
former has the benefit of O(1) access time, but the latter is plenty
fast and has the benefit of supporting backtracking. Backtracking itself
is provided by the logict package and is described in Kiselyov et al.
(2005).

In addition to this modularity, unification-fd implements a number of
optimizations over the algorithm presented in Sheard (2001)--- which is
also the algorithm presented in Cardelli (1987).

* Their implementation uses path compression, which we retain. Though we
modify the compression algorithm in order to make sharing observable.

* In addition, we perform aggressive opportunistic observable sharing, a
potentially novel method of introducing even more sharing than is
provided by the monadic bindings. Basically, we make it so that we can
use the observable sharing provided by the modified path compression as
much as possible (without introducing any new variables).

* And we remove the notoriously expensive occurs-check, replacing it
with visited-sets (which detect cyclic terms more lazily and without the
asymptotic overhead of the occurs-check). A variant of unification which
retains the occurs-check is also provided, in case you really need to
fail fast.

* Finally, a highly experimental branch of the API performs *weighted*
path compression, which is asymptotically optimal. Unfortunately, the
current implementation is quite a bit uglier than the unweighted
version, and I haven't had a chance to perform benchmarks to see how the
constant factors compare. Hence moving it to an experimental branch.

These optimizations pass a test suite for detecting obvious errors. If
you find any bugs, do be sure to let me know. Also, if you happen to
have a test suite or benchmark suite for unification on hand, I'd love
to get a copy.


--------------------------------------------
-- Notes and limitations
--------------------------------------------

[1] At present the library does not appear amenable for implementing
higher-rank unification itself; i.e., for higher-ranked metavariables,
or higher-ranked logic programming. To be fully general we'd have to
abstract over which structural positions are co/contravariant, whether
the unification variables should be predicative or impredicative, as
well as the isomorphisms of moving quantifiers around. It's on my todo
list, but it's certainly non-trivial. If you have any suggestions, feel
free to contact me.

[2] At present it is only suitable for single-sorted (aka untyped)
unification, a la Prolog. In the future I aim to support multi-sorted
(aka typed) unification, however doing so is complicated by the fact
that it can lead to the loss of MGUs; so it will likely be offered as an
alternative to the single-sorted variant, similar to how the weighted
path-compression is currently offered as an alternative.

[3] With the exception of fundeps which are notoriously difficult to
implement. However, they are supported by Hugs and GHC 6.6, so I don't
feel bad about requiring them. Once the API stabilizes a bit more I plan
to release a unification-tf package which uses type families instead,
for those who feel type families are easier to implement or use. There
have been a couple requests for unification-tf, so I've bumped it up on
my todo list.


--------------------------------------------
-- References
--------------------------------------------

Luca Cardelli (1987) /Basic polymorphic typechecking/.
     Science of Computer Programming, 8(2):147--172.

Atze Dijkstra, Arie Middelkoop, S. Doaitse Swierstra (2008)
     /Efficient Functional Unification and Substitution/,
     Technical Report UU-CS-2008-027, Utrecht University.
     <http://www.cs.uu.nl/research/techreps/repo/CS-2008/2008-027.pdf>

Simon Peyton Jones, Dimitrios Vytiniotis, Stephanie Weirich, Mark
     Shields /Practical type inference for arbitrary-rank types/,
     to appear in the Journal of Functional Programming.
     (Draft of 31 July 2007.)

Oleg Kiselyov, Chung-chieh Shan, Daniel P. Friedman, and
     Amr Sabry (2005) /Backtracking, Interleaving, and/
     /Terminating Monad Transformers/, ICFP.
     <http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~ccshan/logicprog/LogicT-icfp2005.pdf>

Tim Sheard (2001) /Generic Unification via Two-Level Types/
     /and Paramterized Modules/, Functional Pearl, ICFP.
     <http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~sheard/papers/generic.ps>

Tim Sheard & Emir Pasalic (2004) /Two-Level Types and/
     /Parameterized Modules/. JFP 14(5): 547--587. This is
     an expanded version of Sheard (2001) with new examples.
     <http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~sheard/papers/JfpPearl.ps>

Wouter Swierstra (2008) /Data types a la carte/, Functional
     Pearl. JFP 18: 423--436.
     <http://www.cs.ru.nl/~wouters/Publications/DataTypesALaCarte.pdf>


--------------------------------------------
-- Links
--------------------------------------------

Homepage:
    http://code.haskell.org/~wren/

Hackage:
    http://hackage.haskell.org/package/unification-fd

Darcs:
    http://community.haskell.org/~wren/unification-fd

Haddock (Darcs version):
    http://community.haskell.org/~wren/unification-fd/dist/doc/html/unification-fd

-- 
Live well,
~wren

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