[Haskell-cafe] Understanding fgl's gfiltermap

23 Sep 2016

      Hi all,

While playing with the fgl library [1] (git rev. 71b66d6), I encountered a situation where the library behaved different from what I expected. I now wonder whether I should adjust my expectations, or whether fgl has a bug. 

What I want to do is filter out nodes and edges based on edge labels. For a specific edge label l, if a node has an incoming or outgoing edge l it can stay, otherwise I want to remove it from my graph. Likewise, any edge that doesn't have label l needs to be removed from my graph.

I wrote a program to do this using gfiltermap, but I got the wrong graph as a result. During debugging, I found that gfiltermap behaved differently from what I would expect. Take the following program:

```haskell
{-# LANGUAGE TupleSections #-}

module Test where

import Debug.Trace
import Data.Graph.Inductive

main :: IO ()
main = prettyPrint test

test :: Gr () ()
test = gfiltermap (Just . traceShowId) testGraph
  where
{-
 - ASCII art representation of the graph:
 -
 - 1 <-4<-- 2
 - /\    -/|
 -  \    /
 -   \3\/_
 -}
  testGraph = mkGraph testNodes testEdges
    where
    testNodes = map (,()) [1, 2, 3, 4]
    testEdges = [ (2, 4, ())
                , (4, 1, ())
                , (2, 3, ())
                , (3, 1, ())
                , (3, 2, ())
                ]
```

This simple program just reconstructs the original graph, but prints the contexts in the process. When it's done, it pretty prints the resulting graph. The debug tracing + pretty printing gives the following output (in that order):

([((),3),((),4)],1,(),[])
([((),3)],2,(),[((),3),((),4)])
([],3,(),[])
([],4,(),[])

1:()->[]
2:()->[((),3),((),4)]
3:()->[((),1),((),2)]
4:()->[((),1)]

The pretty-printed graph correctly shows that there is an edges going from node 4 to node 1. However, the traced output shows node 4 (last line of trace output) with no successors and no predecessors. I would expect nodes 1 and 2 to be included in that tuple as the successor and predecessor in that tuple. Note that these two representations of the same graph _are_ isomorphic.

Despite the isomorphism, this makes implementing my graph filter significantly more clumsy than I would like it to be. So my question is: are my expectations from the library wrong, or is this a bug?

- Jurriën

[1] https://hackage.haskell.org/package/fgl

[Haskell-cafe] Understanding fgl's gfiltermap

J. Stutterheim