Re: [Haskell-cafe] Re: could we get a Data instance for Data.Text.Text?

Hi Jeremy, As Neil Mitchell said before, if you really don't want to expose the internals of Text (by just using a derived instance) then you have no other alternative than to use String conversion. If you've been using it already and performance is not a big problem, then I guess it's ok. Regarding the Serialize issue, maybe I am not understanding the problem correctly: isn't that just another generic function? There are generic implementations of binary get and put for at least two generic programming libraries in Hackage [1, 2], and writing one for SYB shouldn't be hard either, I think. Then you could have a trivial way of generating instances of Serialize, namely something like

instance Serialize MyType where getCopy = gget putCopy = gput

and you could provide Template Haskell code for generating these. Or even just do

instance (Data a) => Serialize a where ...

if you are willing to use OverlappingInstances and UndecidableInstances... Cheers, Pedro [1] http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/regular-extras/0.1.2/doc/html/Ge... [2] http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/multirec-binary/0.0.1/doc/html/G... On Tue, Jan 26, 2010 at 03:16, Jeremy Shaw wrote:

On Sun, Jan 24, 2010 at 5:49 AM, Neil Mitchell wrote:

...

Hi,

The problem with Data for Text isn't that we have to write a new instance, but that you could argue that proper handling of Text with Data would not be using a type class, but have special knowledge baked in to Data. That's far worse than the Serialise problem mentioned above, and no one other than the Data authors could solve it. Of course, I don't believe that, but it is a possible interpretation.

Right.. that is the problem with Text. Do you think the correct thing to do for gunfold and toConstr is to convert the Text to a String and then call the gufold and toConstr for String? Or something else?

...

The Serialise problem is a serious one. I can't think of any good solutions, but I recommend you give knowledge of your serialise class to Derive (http://community.haskell.org/~ndm/derive/http://community.haskell.org/%7Endm/derive/) and then at least the instances can be auto-generated. Writing lots of boilerplate and regularly ripping it up is annoying, setting up something to generate it for you reduces the pain.

We currently use template haskell to generate the Serialize instances in most cases (though some data types have more optimized encodings that were written by hand). However, you must supply the Version and Migration instances by hand (they are super classes of Serialize).

I am all for splitting the Serialize stuff out of happstack .. it is not really happstack specific. Though I suspect pulling it out is not entirely trivial either. I think the existing code depends on syb-with-class.

- jeremy

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