Re: [Haskell-beginners] Return a Foldable instance

Thank you both! So, how can I return something that implements Foldable, so the caller can fold without knowing if it is a [] or a Set and also be able to change the underlying implementation without breaking the code? With this I also want to avoid the extra overhead of the conversion to or from lists, so the user will be folding the [] or Set directly, depending on the implementation. Creating an intermediate data type like this: Temp a = TempList [a] | TempSet (Set a) | ... That implements Foldable could be one solution, but is it a good one? A cons of this is that every new implementation will have to alter this type as well as creating the implementation. Thanks again! On Wed, May 4, 2011 at 12:27 AM, Antoine Latter wrote:

On Tue, May 3, 2011 at 8:31 PM, Federico Mastellone wrote:

...

Hi,

I want to make a function that returns a Foldable instance, briefly, something like this:

import Data.Foldable

test :: Foldable f => f Int test = [1,2,3,4]

One point that helped me figure things out:

The signature:

...

test :: Foldable f => f Int

does NOT mean "the value test satisfies the 'Foldable' contract'

It means "the value test is of ANY 'Foldable' type". As in, it is of whatever type the caller picks, so long as it is 'Foldable'. And a list is not 'whatever type the caller picks.'

Type classes are used in Haskell to write polymorphic functions, not for implementation hiding:

...

myNumericalCalculation :: Fractional n => n -> n -> Bool -> n

The caller can pick if they want to use limited precision Floats or Doubles, or if they want to pay the price for infinite precision Ratio types, or some type that I hadn't even thought of when I wrote the functions.

Antoine

...

But I get this error:

   Couldn't match expected type `f' against inferred type `[]'        `f' is a rigid type variable bound by            the type signature for `test' at Test.hs:3:17    In the expression: [1, 2, 3, 4]    In the definition of `test': test = [1, 2, 3, ....]

How can I make a function like the one above?

I'm creating different implementations of a multimap, using a Set and a [], and instead of providing functions getValuesList and getValuesSet that return a [] and a Set respectively I want to provide a more generic one, getValues that returns a Foldable instance.

Thanks!!!

-- Federico Mastellone Computer Science Engineer - ITBA ".. there are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult."

Tony Hoare, 1980 ACM Turing Award Lecture.

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-- Federico Mastellone Computer Science Engineer - ITBA ".. there are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult." Tony Hoare, 1980 ACM Turing Award Lecture.