Hello all,

I put together a small library for the purpose of creating overloaded indexing operators. The library is available at https://hackage.haskell.org/package/keyed .

I would like to solicit some advice on the design of this library.

Q1:

The library uses TypeFamilies to determine which types to use for the index type (which is used to look up a value) and the value type (which is returned from a lookup).

I originally did this using MultiParamTypeClasses and FunctionalDependencies, but thought this was cleaner; are there any good reasons to go back to using FunDeps?

Q2:

Data.Keyed provides pure indexing, while Data.MKeyed provides monadic indexing (e.g. for mutable vectors or concurrent STM-based maps).

I'm having some trouble with the fact that mutable vectors are keyed on the PrimState of their corresponding PrimMonad. 

Right now, there is a type in the MKeyed class definition called MContainer. This is the type of the Monad that the lookup operation returns. I.e.

(!) :: MKeyed d => d -> MKey d -> MContainer d (MValue d)

~

(!) :: IOVector a -> Int -> IO a

or

(!) :: STVector s a -> Int -> ST s a

Unfortunately, this causes an overlap (because both IOVector and STVector are aliased to MVector).

I tried making an instance for MVector, but the problem is that it's difficult to actually go from `IOVector a = MVector RealWorld a` to `IO` or `STVector s a = MVector s a` to `ST`, because neither `IO` nor `ST` appears in the type of the vector. I can't do

instance (PrimMonad m, s ~ PrimState m) => MKeyed (MVector s a) where ...

    type MContainer (MVector (PrimState m) a) = m

because you can't have type synonyms on the LHS of the type.

I tried bringing `m` into scope using RankNTypes, but that didn't work.

Is there some syntax I can use to bring `m` into scope here?

Or should I be doing this part entirely differently?

Q3:

Is there any way to automatically derive all instances of Keyed for all types of Data.Vector (using Data.Vector.Generic)? Using `instance Vector v a => Keyed (v a) where ...` doesn't work, as it overlaps with everything of the form `(d :: * -> *) (a :: *) :: *`, like `[a]`.

Thanks,

Will

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