ntupel@googlemail.com wrote:
This however does not work because record selectors have module scope, so the compiler will complain that channel et. al. are defined multiple times. As a workaround I could put each type into its own module, but at least GHC requires a file per module (which is *very* inconvenient IMO). If we would have scoped labels (e.g. like proposed here: http://legacy.cs.uu.nl/daan/pubs.html#scopedlabels) it seems like it would have been straightforward.
So certainly I am missing something and there is a better way to design this. Hence this e-mail. I welcome any advice how this would best be done in Haskell with GHC.
One alternative is to use Haskell's support for ad-hoc overloading. Define a typeclass for each selector (or group of selectors that must always occur together) which is polymorphic in the record type. Combine this with the separate constructor types to get something like: data HandshakeRequest = HandshakeRequest String ... data HandshakeResponse = HandshakeResponse String Bool ... ... data BayeuxMessage = HSReq HandshakeRequest | HSRes HandshakeResponse ... class BayeuxChannel r where channel :: r -> String instance BayeuxChannel HandshakeRequest where channel (HandshakeRequest ch ...) = ch instance BayeuxChannel HandshakeResponse where channel (HandshakeResponse ch _ ...) = ch ... class BayeuxSuccessful r where successful :: r -> Bool ... It's not pretty, but it gets the job done. Many people decry this as improper use of typeclasses though (and rightly so). A better approach would probably be to use GADTs or the new data families which give a sort of dual of typeclasses (typeclasses give a small set of functions for a large set of types; GADTs give a large set of functions for a small set of types[0]). Someone more familiar with those approaches should give those versions. If you want to be able to set the fields as well as read them then the classes should be more like lenses than projectors. For instance, this[1] discussion on Reddit. The two obvious options are a pair of setter and getter functions: (Whole->Part, Whole->Part->Whole); or a factored version of the same: Whole->(Part, Part->Whole). You should also take a look at the data-accessor packages[2][3] which aim to give a general solution to the lens problem. Also take a look at hptotoc[4], the Haskell implementation of Google's Protocol Buffers which has many similar problems to your Bayeaux protocol. In general, protocols designed for OO are difficult to translate into non-OO languages. [0] http://blog.codersbase.com/tag/gadt/ [1] http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/86oc3/yet_another_proposal_for_hask... [2] http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/data-accessor [3] http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/data-accessor-tem... [4] http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/hprotoc -- Live well, ~wren