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Recursion over the structure of a type

Hi! I am building a system for monadic reference counting in Haskell. A reference is defined as:

class Reference r where
new :: a -> St s (r a)
get :: r a -> St s a
incr :: r a -> St s ()
decr :: r a -> St s ()

The problem is that I would like to automatically inspect the structure of type a, so that incr and decr also increment any references contained in a recursively. Any suggestions?

By giuseppemag at 2010-11-29 09:22 | LtU Forum | previous forum topic | next forum topic | other blogs | 4623 reads

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This seems like the wrong

This seems like the wrong forum for this -- I'd take it to stackoverflow (with the Haskell tag).

By S. Clover at Mon, 2010-11-29 14:41 | login or register to post comments

Not really...

...since it is far more about generic programming than it is about Haskell. To be even more precise, I am not even using Haskell: I am just considering how this would be done with its type system.

In fact I was wondering mostly about:
1) converting types to a simpler representation (embedding projection?) for matching against type classes
2) generalized maps/folds

I need some help finding references and pointers!

By giuseppemag at Mon, 2010-11-29 15:03 | login or register to post comments

A Rosetta stone

A Rosetta stone

And multirec, which is one take on the state-of-the-art.

By S. Clover at Mon, 2010-11-29 15:39 | login or register to post comments

Aren't PolyP, Generic

Aren't PolyP, Generic Haskell and SYBP also attempts at this?

By giuseppemag at Mon, 2010-11-29 17:50 | login or register to post comments

Levitation

It would seem that McBride's "the Gentle Art of Levitation", which deals with the minimal requirements to build dependent types, offers access to the mechanisms you need to do this.

By ChrisD at Wed, 2010-12-01 02:50 | login or register to post comments