On Fri, Dec 21, 2012 at 9:27 AM, Christopher Howard wrote:
Thank you for your help. An additional question, if I might: For the sake of elegance and simplicity, I modified the class and instances to avoid the "tuple" aspect:
data Socket2 a b = Socket2 a b instance (Monoid a, Monoid b) => Monoid (Socket2 a b) where
Of course, I thought it would be likely I would want other classes and instances with additional numbers of types:
data Socket3 a b c = Socket3 a b c instance (Monoid a, Monoid b, Monoid c) => Monoid (Socket3 a b c) where
data Socket4 a b c d = Socket4 a b c d instance (Monoid a, Monoid b, Monoid c, Monoid d) => Monoid (Socket4 a b
data Socket 5 a b c d e... et cetera --------
Seeing as the pattern here is so rigid and obvious, I was wondering: is it possible to abstract this even more? So I could, for instance, just specify that I want a Socket with 8 types, and poof, it would be there? Or is this as meta as we get? (I.e., without going to something like Template Haskell.)
This perhaps isn't the answer you were looking for, but just in case you weren't aware, there are already Monoid instances for tuples up to 5. You can see this at: http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/base/latest/doc/html/Data-Monoid... Another possibility is a generic monoid class (using generic-deriving): {-# LANGUAGE TypeOperators #-} {-# LANGUAGE DefaultSignatures #-} {-# LANGUAGE FlexibleContexts #-} -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- import GHC.Generics -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- class GMonoid' f where gempty' :: f x gappend' :: f x -> f x -> f x instance GMonoid' U1 where gempty' = U1 gappend' U1 U1 = U1 instance GMonoid a => GMonoid' (K1 i a) where gempty' = K1 gempty gappend' (K1 x) (K1 y) = K1 (x `gappend` y) instance GMonoid' f => GMonoid' (M1 i c f) where gempty' = M1 gempty' gappend' (M1 x) (M1 y) = M1 (x `gappend'` y) instance (GMonoid' f, GMonoid' h) => GMonoid' (f :*: h) where gempty' = gempty' :*: gempty' gappend' (x1 :*: y1) (x2 :*: y2) = gappend' x1 x2 :*: gappend' y1 y2 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- class GMonoid a where gempty :: a gappend :: a -> a -> a default gempty :: (Generic a, GMonoid' (Rep a)) => a gempty = to gempty' default gappend :: (Generic a, GMonoid' (Rep a)) => a -> a -> a gappend x y = to (gappend' (from x) (from y)) instance (GMonoid b, GMonoid c) => GMonoid (b,c) -- ... Regards, Sean