Hello Henry,

The paper "A Lightweight Approach To Datatype-Generic Rewriting" [1] describes a way to generically add a constructor to any regular datatype using type-indexed datatypes [2]. A similar technique could be used to add a new field to each constructor. Then you get something like:

data Foo
type Extended f = ...

|Extended Foo| represents your |Foo| datatype with an added |z| field of type |Int|. Since the underlying generic programming library used (regular [3]) has Template Haskell generation, you don't even have to write the generic representations for your many datatypes.

(As far as I know, SYB does not mix with type-indexed datatypes.)


Cheers,
Pedro

[1] Thomas van Noort, Alexey Rodriguez, Stefan Holdermans, Johan Jeuring, Bastiaan Heeren. A Lightweight Approach to Datatype-Generic Rewriting. Submitted to the Workshop on Generic Programming 2008. http://www.cs.uu.nl/wiki/bin/view/Alexey/ALightweightApproachToDatatype-GenericRewriting
[2] http://www.iai.uni-bonn.de/~ralf/publications/SCP2004.pdf
[3] http://www.cs.uu.nl/wiki/GenericProgramming/Regular

On Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 16:29, Henry Laxen <nadine.and.henry@pobox.com> wrote:
Dear Group,

It seems to me this should be easy, but I can't quite figure out
how to do it without a lot of typing.  Here is the question:

Suppose you have a data type like:
Data Foo = Foo { a :: Int, b :: Int,
  ... many other fields ...
 y :: Int } deriving (Eq, Read, Show, Typeable, Data)

Now I would like to add a field z :: Int to the end of Foo.  If
I have a ton of data out on disk, which I wrote with, say
writeFile "a.data" (show foo) -- where foo is a [Foo] say 1000
long, I would like to get a new "a.data" file which has a new
z::Int field.

So far the only way I can think of is to make a new Data Foo1,
which includes the z::Int, read in a.data as a list of Foo,
write a function like:

fooTofoo1 :: Foo -> Foo1
fooTofoo1 xx = Foo1 {a = a xx, ... y = y xx, z = 1}

then write the file back out, and perhaps use emacs to
query-replace all the Foo1's back to Foo's, add the z::Int field
back into Foo, and read it back.

Please tell me there is a better way.  Thanks in advance.
Best wishes,
Henry Laxen

PS:
I have read syb1, and syb2 a couple of times now, but so far
haven't been able to connect it with this kind of problem.




_______________________________________________
Haskell-Cafe mailing list
Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org
http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe