February 2002 - Haskell-Cafe

higher-kind deriving ... or not
by C T McBride 27 Feb '02

27 Feb '02

Hi I'm rather fond of fixpoint constructions like this one: > newtype Copy a = Copy a deriving Show > data Wonky f > = Wonky > | Manky (f (Wonky f)) > deriving Show (Clearly this is an ill-motivated example, but the real example which caused this problem is available on request...) The trouble is that when I ask either hugs -98 or ghci -fglasgow-exts to show (Wonky :: Wonky Copy) the poor compiler's brain explodes. I take it this is a known problem with instance inference, deriving, etc. Of course, it's easy to write my own show for Wonky Copy, but that's a tad annoying. I tried to guess the type of the show instance derived for Wonky. Being a naive sort of chap, I thought it might be show :: (forall a. Show a => Show (f a)) => Wonky f -> String but that's a syntax error. A little more tinkering, and it looks like it might be show :: Show (f (Wonky f)) => Wonky f -> String Is this really the type of show? If so, no wonder there's a problem. I don't want to start an argument about how to solve this problem. I do want to suggest that, for the time being, it would be better to reject `deriving Show' for type constructors like Wonky (ie those with higher-kind parameters) than to generate instances which break the compiler. Or am I just being a spoilsport? Conor

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java program
by Stewart Litt 26 Feb '02

26 Feb '02

dear sir/madam iam contacting you regarding a java problem which i have come across. My teacher at manchester met has set a problem for us to solve but thinking his teaching is excellent and everyone understands him wen no one does I would appreciate you helping me in this problem as it would save us from embarrassment. THE PROBLEM: Consider a simplified plan of the liverpool bus system. The system consists of a network of bus stops(at most 20) and bus lines (at most 5). Each bus stop has a unique name and each busline has a unique number. Each bus stop is connected to other bus stops by at most 3 different bus lines. Each of these bus lines connects a bus stop to exactly one other bus stop and for each bus stop and each connecting bus line it is known how many minutes the bus needs to get to the next bus stop. The objectives are to design and implement in java: 1. A representation of the bus system using suitable data structures. 2. A mechanism to go from one bus stop to a conected bus stop via a particular bus line. 3. A mechanism for searching for a connection between two given bus stops. A command line text based interface should be provided that will allow the user to issue a series of the following five commands: start: Allows to enter the current bus stop by name and resets the total journey time to zero. list: The system will show the total journey time so far, and all information on the current bus stop, that is, its name and the numbers of all outgoing bus lines. go: The system asks for the number of a busline. If the number is that of an outgoing busline, then the system finds out the busstop connected to the current bus stop and makes it the new current bus stop. If the number is not that of an outgoing bus line, then the system will indicate this by a message , but make no other changes. search: The system asks for the name of a bus stop. The system will then indicate whether there is a way to get to this bus stop from the current bus stop, but makes no other changes. exit: Stops and exits the system. Description of the liverpool bus stop below. THE LIVERPOOL BUS SYSTEM Bus Stop Outgoing bus line Connected bus stop Time in mins Bootle strand 22 South road 11 Pier head 10 Shiel road 14 22 Bootle strand 7 79 Edge hill 11 Edge hill 79 Picton clock 10 Green lane 10 Page moss 13 22 Bootle strand 18 Page moss 10 Prescot 8 Picton clock 79 Netherly 21 Shiel road 10 Green lane 5 South road 22 Green lane 9 _________________________________________________________________ MSN Photos is the easiest way to share and print your photos: http://photos.msn.com/support/worldwide.aspx

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a more practical version of getLine???
by Rich 26 Feb '02

26 Feb '02

Hi, I'm writing a program for my final project at uni and I've come across the following annoying bug in my program. Basically, I have an interactive text prompt and I wish to be able to write commands into the prompt. I am currently using the function 'getLine', which as it's name suggests reads a line of text from the prompt. Unfortunately, when the delete key is used while writing to the prompt, the output differs (so typing "loaf" then 'delete' and then "d" does not seem to produce the same output as typing "load"). Also, the left and right arrow keys don't work, as they do in any normal text prompt. Any suggestins as to an alternative method to read the input??? (I'm by no means a Haskell expert btw, so I may have to be spoon fed!) thanks for your help, Rich.

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Help
by Juan M. Duran 25 Feb '02

25 Feb '02

Hi, I need to parse a string to a list of integer, like this: "12 32\n15...." to [12,32,15...] f :: String -> [Int] What I´ve found is the function "words" which does words :: String -> [String] it is in the Prelude.hs then if I have something like "12 32\n15..." with words I get ["12","32","15"...] which is cool but not exactly what I need. Would you help me? Thanks J. ------------------------------------ Porque la única lucha que se pierde, es la que se abandona, ¡Ni un paso atrás!

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RE: Monadic Call/CC?
by Simon Marlow 25 Feb '02

25 Feb '02

> At 2002-02-23 07:55, Marcin 'Qrczak' Kowalczyk wrote: > > >It's in GHC in module MonadCont, together with a monad transformer > >providing continuations and some instances. > > Could this sort of thing _please_ be added to > <http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/set/book-hslibs.html> > or somewhere? Is this documented somewhere? My apologies for the lack of documentation for some of these libraries, and the generally poor state of the doumentation for hslibs. Some of the libraries come from external sources, and in some cases the authors didn't provide documentation, or provided it in a form that we couldn't use directly. For the next release of GHC, I'm hoping we can do a much better job, though not just by writing more documentation but by generating more of it automatically from the source code. That's the plan; we don't have anything concrete yet. Cheers, Simon

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Re: Graphs
by David Feuer 25 Feb '02

25 Feb '02

I seem to remember an article about functional graph algorithms using extra-lazy arrays. Anyone know if these arrays have appeared in any mainstream implementation? David Feuer

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RE: Survival of generic-classes in ghc
by Simon Peyton-Jones 25 Feb '02

25 Feb '02

| > Another possiblity would be to make the ConCls class look like this | > class ConCls c where | > name :: String | > arity :: Int | > ...etc... | > | > Now we'd have to give an explicit type argument at the call site: | > | > show {| Constr c t |} (Con x) = (name {| c |}) ++ show x | > | > I quite like the thought of being able to supply explicit type | > arguments.... but I don't konw how to speak about the order of type | > parameters. What order does map takes its two type parameters in? | | Sorry, this seems like a non-sequitur to me? | | 'map' has type '(a->b) -> [a] -> [b]'; supplying explicit | type parameters would mean giving values to 'a' and 'b'. If | I wanted to propose notation for this, I would suggest, e.g., | (map :: (String -> Int) -> [String] -> [Int]) length | ["Hello", "World"] | | 'name' (above) has type 'String'; the '{| c |}' is not | providing a type parameter in the same sense. Yes it is. 'name' would have type forall c. ConCls c => String It requires a type argument, just like map. Simon

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RE: Survival of generic-classes in ghc
by Simon Peyton-Jones 25 Feb '02

25 Feb '02

| I'm disturbed by the idea of adding explicit type application | and the like to Haskell. Haskell language extensions are | rapidly becoming a riotous array of confusing syntax and | twisty semantic corners. From an experimenter's standpoint, | this isn't so bad. However, many of these extensions are | incredibly useful, and there's a lot of code relying upon | them. This creates pressure (from both users and | implementors) to immortalize the existing, grubby | implementations. The result? An incomprehensible, byzantine language. Yes, that's a danger. My own hope is that the practial experience of using and programming with these various features will lead us slowly to a realisation of some underlying unifying approaches or principles. That is what the rest of you message is reaching for -- which is great. But it easier to identify the problem than to come up with a satisfactory solution, and I for one do not have one. But I think it would be great to find one. Simon

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RE: Survival of generic-classes in ghc
by Simon Peyton-Jones 25 Feb '02

25 Feb '02

| As long as we're reifying everything in sight, why not | simplify the design problem and reify the constructor dictionaries? Because the generic function may be building the contructor not taking it apart. (Think of a generic read function). So there is no reified constructor to deconstruct. This is discussed in the generic classes paper. It has to be done by recursion over the type. It's emphatically not just an efficiency issue. Simon

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(no subject)
by Tom Bevan 25 Feb '02

25 Feb '02

Hi, I've come across this sort of data constructor below many times but I'm not really sure how to use it. Can someone please point me to the right section in the documentation? In particular, I want to know how to create a calendar time and how to access the fields . Tom data CalendarTime = CalendarTime { ctYear :: Int, ctMonth :: Month, ctDay, ctHour, ctMin, ctSec :: Int, ctPicosec :: Integer, ctWDay :: Day, ctYDay :: Int, ctTZName :: String, ctTZ :: Int, ctIsDST :: Bool } deriving (Eq, Ord, Read, Show)

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