This is the first *real* release `shapely-data`, a haskell library up here on hackage: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/shapely-data for working with algebraic datatypes in a simple generic form made up of haskell's primitive product, sum and unit types: `(,)`, `Either`, and `()`. You can install it with cabal install shapely-data # Motivation and examples In order from most to least important to me, here are the concerns that motivated the library: - Provide a good story for `(,)`/`Either` as a *lingua franca* generic representation that other library writers can use without dependencies, encouraging abstractions in terms of products and sums (motivated specifically by my work on `simple-actors`: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/simple-actors - Support algebraic operations on ADTs, making types composable -- multiplication: let a = (X,(X,(X,()))) b = Left (Y,(Y,())) :: Either (Y,(Y,())) (Z,()) ab = a >*< b in ab == ( Left (X,(X,(X,(Y,(Y,()))))) :: Either (X,(X,(X,(Y,(Y,()))))) (X,(X,(X,(Z,())))) ) -- exponents, etc: fanout (head,(tail,(Prelude.length,()))) [1..3] == (1,([2,3],(3,()))) (unfanin (_4 `ary` (shiftl . Sh.reverse)) 1 2 3 4) == (3,(2,(1,(4,())))) - Support powerful, typed conversions between `Shapely` types data F1 = F1 (Maybe F1) (Maybe [Int]) deriving Eq data F2 = F2 (Maybe F2) (Maybe [Int]) deriving Eq f2 :: F2 f2 = coerce (F1 Nothing $ Just [1..3]) data Tsil a = Snoc (Tsil a) a | Lin deriving Eq truth = massage "123" == Snoc (Snoc (Snoc Lin '3') '2') '1' Lowest on the list is supporting abstracting over different recursion schemes or supporting generic traversals and folds, though some basic support is planned. Finally, in at least some cases this can completely replace `GHC.Generics` and may be a bit simpler. See `examples/Generics.hs` for an example of the `GHC.Generics` wiki example: http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/GHC.Generics ...ported to `shapely-data`. And for a nice view on the changes that were required, do: git show 3a65e95 | perl /usr/share/doc/git/contrib/diff-highlight/diff-highlight ## Why not GHC.Generics? The `GHC.Generics` representation has a lot of metadata and a complex structure that can be useful in deriving default instances; more important to us is to have a simple, canonical representation such that two types that differ only in constructor names can be expected to have identical generic representations. This supports APIs that are type-agnostic (e.g. a database library that returns a generic `Product`, convertible later with `to`), and allows us to define algebraic operations and composition & conversion functions. Happy Holidays, everybody! Brandon