I think I found the answers to all my questions at
http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Existential_type
Drew Haven
drew.haven@gmail.com
On Wed, Aug 25, 2010 at 9:43 PM, Drew Haven
I thought I was getting pretty good at Haskell, until I ran into this problem. It's basically a way of maintaining encapsulation of data and functions while being able to have a container, such as a list, hold these items without worrying about their differences. In OO this would be pretty easy. You'd have an interface of some sort and the container would hold objects of the interface type. Then you could write the individual classes that implement that interface in their own files and the main program wouldn't have to know about the details.
I'm trying to write a silly little life simulator. We've got a world where many different entities exist. These entities are all different, but for a start we'll use fish and shark. The fish like to swim around in the sea, and will manage to eat some amount of the overall food supply. The amount they consume from year to year varies and they have to consume a minimum amount every year or they die. When they've eaten enough food and have build up a surplus, they'll reproduce, but if they're starving they can't. Sharks are similar, except their food supply is the fish. The two are very similar, but do slightly different things. And every fish or shark has to keep track of its own amount of consumed food.
If I wanted to define these separately, the best I've come up with is to create a data type that has all the information necessary, then somewhere maintain a master algebraic data type which wraps each of these in a type constructor. I can then write another head for a general function that will match that type constructor and describe the behavior.
I tried something clever with closures, but it turned out to be too clever for me and I couldn't avoid infinite types.
Thoughts?
Drew Haven drew.haven@gmail.com