Add NonEmptyMap and NonEmptySet to containers

Thu Apr 25 14:11:23 UTC 2019

I'm -1 on any kind of Map = NEMap.

An ordinary map and a non-empty map are semantically different. I believe that if I non-empty maps were already in containers, I would pretty much always care whether a Map I see in code is a 0-map or 1-map.
Similarly, I prefer Int and Word instead of Int and Unsigned.Int. (Luckily that's already the case.)
We already have a precedent with Text and ByteString, where the lazy and the strict versions are only distinguished by the module prefix. In my experience, modules where both are used are pretty common, and I end up just introducing type LByteString = Lazy.ByteString in all my projects, because otherwise I need to scroll to the imports section whenever I need to know which flavor of bytestring is being used. (Or if I'm reading haddocks, I have to look at the link because Haddock hides module prefixes.)
"why not both" is even worse. I still can't trust the Map, but now I also have to learn and remember that two modules are the same. Speaking from experience again – most people seem to be surprised by the fact that Data.Map.Lazy and Data.Map.Strict export the same Map type. The proposed module hierarchy would move containers to the top of my "packages that confuse beginners" list, beating even aeson.
As an aside, I wish we had a proper interface for container-like structures, or at least a solution to name scoping. I really like the way Rust does it, for instance, where certain functions can be "attached" to a type – I'm hesitant to call them "methods" because Rust is not an OOP language.
On Apr 25 2019, at 2:49 pm, Mario Blažević <mblazevic at stilo.com> wrote:
> On 2019-04-18 11:00 p.m., David Feuer wrote:
> > I'm in favor of the proposal. I find the isomorphism between Map (a,b) v
> > and Map a (NonemptyMap b v) very pleasant. The fact that others have
> > written less-performant implementations of this idea is rather
> > convincing. The fact that doing this removes partial matches in the
> > implementation is nice. And I'll take performance improvements where I
> > can get them. The main question is the proper name of the type. Just
> > Data.Map.Nonempty.Map, or .NonemptyMap? Should the empty be capitalized?
>
>
> There seems to be a consensus for Data.Map.NonEmpty.NEMap, with the
> type and the functions slightly off the regular ones. This design would
> make it easier to use regular and non-empty containers together, but it
> be annoying for the use case of replacing all uses of an existing
> regular container with a non-empty one. I'd rather change just the
> import declaration than all occurrences of the type name and functions.
>
> I don't want to derail the implementation with bikeshedding, so I'm
> just going to ask why not both? The library can both export the tweaked
> names and add a module, say Data.NonEmpty.Map.Lazy, that exports the
> type synonym Map = NEMap. It would also rename all the functions back to
> their names from Data.Map.Lazy.
>
>
> >
> > On Thu, Apr 18, 2019, 7:15 PM John Cotton Ericson
> > <John.Ericson at obsidian.systems> wrote:
> >
> > In https://github.com/haskell/containers/issues/608 I proposed
> > adding non-empty variants of Map and Set, analogous to
> > Data.List.NonEmpty for List, to containers. semigroupoids
> > demonstrates the many uses and structure of non-empty containers in
> > general, and libraries such as
> > https://github.com/mstksg/nonempty-containers and
> > https://github.com/andrewthad/non-empty-containers demonstrate the
> > interest in non-empty maps and sets in particular. My favorite
> > use-case is that they're needed to "curry" containers: for example,
> > |Map (k0, k1) v| is isomorphic not to |Map k0 (Map k1 v)| but to
> > |Map k0 (NonEmptyMap k1 v)|. I like this use-case because it comes
> > from the containers themselves.
> >
> > Importantly, there's no good way to do this outside of containers;
> > doing so leads to imbalancing / extra indirection, or massive code
> > duplication. If one wraps the container was an extra value like
> > Data.List.NonEmpty, one's left with an unavoidable extra
> > indirection/imbalance. One can rectify this by copying and modifying
> > the implementation of containers, but that's hardly maintainable;
> > even as though the algorithms are the same, enough lines are touched
> > that merging upstream containers is nigh impossible.
> >
> > On the other hand, the non-empty containers can be elegantly and
> > sufficiently implemented alongside their originals by taking the Bin
> > constructor and breaking it out into it's own type, mutually
> > recursive with the original. This avoids the indirection/imbalancing
> > and code duplication problems: the algorithms work exactly as before
> > creating the same trees (remember the UNPACK), and no code
> > duplicated since the functions become mutually recursive matching
> > the types.
> >
> > To briefly summarize the thread:
> > 1. I proposed the issue after performing this same refactor on the
> > dependent-map package:
> > https://github.com/obsidiansystems/dependent-map/tree/non-empty,
> > a fork of containers.
> > 2. I made https://github.com/haskell/containers/pull/616 which just
> > changes the types, to make sure UNPACK preserved the importance.
> > 3. https://gist.github.com/Ericson2314/58709d0d99e0c0e83ad266701cd71841
> > the benchmarks showed rather than degrading performance, PR 616
> > actually /improved/ it.
> >
> > If there is preliminary consensus, I'll make a second PR on top
> > which generalizes the functions like on my dependent-map branch.
> >
> > Thanks,
> > John
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