When Mark Shields and I tackled this problem we came up with Object-Oriented Style Overloading for Haskell http://research.microsoft.com/~simonpj/Papers/oo-haskell/index.htm It describes an (unimplemented) extension to Haskell, rather than modelling it in Haskell itself, but you may find it interesting none the less. Simon | -----Original Message----- | From: haskell-cafe-bounces@haskell.org [mailto:haskell-cafe-bounces@haskell.org] On Behalf Of | Brandon Michael Moore | Sent: 24 September 2003 22:22 | To: haskell-cafe@haskell.org | Subject: Modeling multiple inheritance | | I'm trying to build a nicer interface over the one generated by | jvm-bridge. I'm using fancy type classes to remove the need to mangle | method names. I would like methods to be automatcially inherited, | following an inheritance hierarcy defined with another set of type | classes. | | My basic classes look like this | class HasFooMethod cls args result | cls args -> result where | foo :: cls -> args -> result | | If I have classes A and B with foo methods like | foo_JA_Jint :: ClassA -> Jint -> Bool | foo_JB_Jboolean :: ClassB -> Bool -> Jint | then I can make instances | instance HasFooMethod ClassA Jint Bool | instance HasFooMethod ClassB Bool Jint | | Now I can just use foo everywhere. I would like to avoid declaring an | instance for every class though. In java methods are inherited from a | superclass, and I would like to inherit methods automatically as well. In | the bindings jvm-bridge generates a method is invoked with a function | mangled after the highest ancestor that defined that particular | overloading, so the implementation of HasFooMethod at a particular | overloading is the same for any descendant. | | So I defined a class to model the inheritance relationships | | class SubType super sub | sub -> super where | upCast :: sub -> super | | Now I can define a default instance of HasFooMethod: | instance (HasFooMethod super args result, | SubClass super sub) => | HasFooMethod sub args result where | foo sub args = foo (upCast sub) args | | This will propagate foo methods down the inheritance hierarcy. If a new | class C is derived from A, I just need to say | | instance SubClass ClassA ClassC | | and ClassC gets a foo method. (In the actually code I piggy-back on a | transitive subclass relation jvm-bridge defines that already includes an | upcast method, so upCast has a default that should always be acceptable). | | The problem comes when interfaces are added to the mix. Interfaces are | treated just like classes by jvm-bridge, and even though no implementation | is inherited from instances in Java, the method accessors generated by | jvm-bridge should be inherited. | | One problem is that the subclass relationship needs the functional | dependency so that the default instance of HasFooMethod will respects the | functional dependencies of HasFooMethod, so I can't declare subclass | instances for multiple inheritance. On the other hand, if I don't use the | functional dependency on HasFooMethod I end up needing to annotate most of | the return values in a program. I run into similar problems trying to use | numeric literals as arguments, because they are also overloaded. | | Does anyone know of clever solutions that would model multiple inheritance | while preserving the functional dependencies (unsafe compiler flags are | fine too), or ways to reduce the pain of overloading resolution without | the functional dependency? | | One alternative is generating seperate HasFooMethod instances for every | class in the system. The problem is that this would require alterating the | bit of jvm-bridge that uses JNI to find information on classes, which | currently only reports newly defined methods. JNI is black magic to me. | | Thanks | Brandon | | _______________________________________________ | Haskell-Cafe mailing list | Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org | http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe