Generic Haskell: applications Ralf Hinze1 and Johan Jeuring2,3 1 Institut f¨urInformatik III, Universit¨atBonn R¨omerstraße 164, 53117 Bonn, Germany
[email protected] http://www.informatik.uni-bonn.de/~ralf/ 2 Institute of Information and Computing Sciences, Utrecht University P.O.Box 80.089, 3508 TB Utrecht, The Netherlands
[email protected] http://www.cs.uu.nl/~johanj/ 3 Open University, Heerlen, The Netherlands Abstract. 1 Generic Haskell is an extension of Haskell that supports the construc- tion of generic programs. This article describes generic programming in practice. It discusses three advanced generic programming applications: generic dictionaries, compressing XML documents, and the zipper. When describing and implementing these examples, we will encounter some advanced features of Generic Haskell, such as type-indexed data types, dependencies between and generic abstractions of generic functions, ad- justing a generic function using a default case, and generic functions with a special case for a particular constructor. 1 Introduction A polytypic (or generic, type-indexed) function is a function that can be instan- tiated on many data types to obtain data type specific functionality. Examples of polytypic functions are the functions that can be derived in Haskell [50], such as show, read, and ‘ ’. In [23] we have introduced type-indexed functions, and we have shown how to implement them in Generic Haskell [7]. For an older introduction to generic programming, see Backhouse et al [4]. Why is generic programming important? Generic programming makes pro- grams easier to write: – Programs that could only be written in an untyped style can now be written in a language with types.