Hi David, I'm working on a Haskell library for interacting with emacs org files. For
those that do not know, an org file is a structured outline style file that has nested headings, text, tables and other elements.
Great! Sounds like fun. :) Now, this all works as expected (files are correctly being parsed and
written), however I am having a lot of trouble trying to come up with a decent API to work with this. While writing an OrgFile is fairly easy, reading (and accessing inner parts) of an org file is very tedious, and modifying them is horrendous.
I can imagine.
However, I don't know if this is even possible, how to do it, or if there is a better alternative to this. I would really apreciate any hints with regards to this. It would be useful to know if there are other libraries that also face this problem, and how they solved it.
I definite agree with Neil: I think generic programming is exactly what you are looking for. Fortunately, there are a number of libraries available to help you solve your problem. The next problem is figuring out which one and learning how to it. For this purpose, a comparison of libraries for generic programming in Haskell was recently published: http://www.cs.uu.nl/wiki/Alexey/ComparingLibrariesForGenericProgrammingInHas... That should give you an idea of what's out there and the pros and cons of each library. I found your example particularly interesting, so I decided to try out a solution in EMGM (Extensible and Modular Generics for the Masses). I wrote up my experiment here: http://splonderzoek.blogspot.com/2009/03/experiments-with-emgm-emacs-org-fil... More information on EMGM is here: http://www.cs.uu.nl/wiki/GenericProgramming/EMGM I'd be happy to help you figure out if EMGM is appropriate for other things you want to do. Good luck with your library! Regards, Sean