On Thu, Feb 19, 2009 at 10:18 AM, Jamie Brandon
Maybe this is of interest: http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/gmap
The edison api is much more stable. The gmap api was already in place when I started working on it but I would prefer to at some point make it a superset of the edison api. No sense in having more than one map interface lying around.
Jamie
What would really be nice is a general interface to a lot of different types of containers that was both standardized by the community AND used as the basis for lots of different libraries. For instance, the new split package is a well-crafted library for dealing with splitting lists, but it only works on lists. The exact same logic that's already there could be used for splitting ByteStrings, Lazy ByteStrings, Data.Sequences, some of the sequence types in Edison, fixed-length vectors, etc., but currently, the way the package is made forces you to use only Haskell's lazy lists. Now if we look at the zlib package, this package decompresses data into the lazy ByteString format. So you can't directly split data that comes out of zlib - you have to convert it to String and then back again, which is annoying and also imposes a performance cost. If we could figure out a way to have a general interface to "sequence-like" or "map-like" or "set-like" objects, we could make our libraries a lot more general and also more useful in combination with each other. Alex