(moved to haskell-cafe) Hello Jean-Philippe, Tuesday, May 30, 2006, 2:58:01 PM, you wrote:

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you should also see to the Collections package: darcs get --partial http://darcs.haskell.org/packages/collections/ although it contains only _immutable_ datastructures at this moment. may be, you can codevelop with Bernardy interface for mutable maps/sets

I'm not sure there is significant overlap between what we're doing. I'd be delighted to cooperate if you think this is possible though.

well, what i think: while all the actual work will be performed by Caio himself, we can help him (and to ourselves as possible future users of this lib) by describing infrastructure in that he need to insert his work and pointing to "adjancent" projects so, Caio, now i write for you, better organizing my previous post: 1. In terms of Haskell, Judy is a library of _mutable_ collections of _unboxed_ elements. i pointed you to the Array wiki page, where differences between boxed and unboxed, mutable and immutable datastructures are described 2. Collections is a library of _immutable_ datastructures, and Jean-Philippe especially omitted any support for mutable datastructures - because it's the whole story of it's own. So, you don't need to write your work as part of the Collections library 3. Nevertheless, Collections has GREAT organization and it will be very helpful to study it. in particular, see at the Data.Collections module, what describes various classes into which all collections are fitted, and hierarchy between them 4. Next, when you will search for the datatypes/classes whose interface you can imitate, you will find only Data.HashTable - other datatypes in standard libraries are either immutable (say, Map) or need contiguous indexes (say, MArray). So you will need to create your own interface and here you can borrow from the Collections lib. Just see at the differences between IArray and MArray classes. They are very close, only MArray class update arrays on-the-place and has additional 'Monad m' on all it's return types. say, class IArray a e where unsafeAt :: (Index i) => a i e -> i -> e becomes class MArray a e m where unsafeRead :: (Index i) => a i e -> i -> m e You can do the same with Collections classes. instead of reinventing the wheel, you can add letter 'M' to it :) say, class Monoid c => Map c k a | c -> k a where insert :: k -> a -> c -> c delete :: k -> c -> c member :: k -> c -> Bool would become class (Monoid c, Monad m) => MapM c k a | c -> k a where insertM :: k -> a -> c -> m () deleteM :: k -> c -> m () memberM :: k -> c -> m Bool 5. as i already said, then you should use StablePtr and any form of hashing/seriazliation in order to map between boxed (Haskell) and unboxed (C) values. and then you can develop series of Diff transformers what emulates immutable collections via mutable ones (say interface of class Map via the interface of class MapM), DiffArray can serve as template here 6. There is no class framework for container types other than this Data.Collections module, so implementing it's close imitation (with monadic operations) will help future users to easily learn and use both interfaces -- Best regards, Bulat mailto:Bulat.Ziganshin@gmail.com