Without looking too much at your code, my immediate guess is that you should use one of the boilerplate functions that can stop at a certain depth. One pitfall pointed out in the original boilerplate paper is that if you have some data type like:

data Foo = Foo Int String

and you're looking for Ints and transforming them, it will also recurse into the strings and look at every character, because it doesn't know that it can't find an Int in there. Is perhaps something like this going on for you? - Hal On Tue, 4 Nov 2003 Markus.Schnell@infineon.com wrote:

Perhaps some remember the question I posted about avoiding boilerplate some time ago: (http://haskell.org/pipermail/haskell/2003-August/012479.html)

After some experimentation I employed Hal's DynamicMap as well as the Generics library. This worked fine for a while, but after I started using my program on bigger problems it soon turned out that the program spent more than 40% (!) of its memory on the lookupDM operation and most of its time on stypeOf.

This was not acceptable and so I switched back to my original solution (albeit somewhat easier implemented), which is... ...using lots of boilerplate. The memory usage drops to roughly 2% for lookupDM.

For those interested, the approach is described below. Instead of coding the boilerplate by hand, I wrote a function for automatic generation, making it more robust and extensible. There's also room for improvement, but I needed a quick, working solution, not a perfect one.

The alert reader may have noticed that I didn't mention Generics again. First I was using a map function like this

...

segmap f s = everywhere (mkT f) s

planning to explore some of the visiting strategies.

But this resulted in spending a lot of time in the segmap function, while using a self-written map on the structure was much faster. I didn't keep records, though. Perhaps the boilerplate people (Ralf Lämmel, Simon PJ) have already looked at performance issues?

If you stayed with me, thank you for your time.

Markus

=== Approach Description ===

Four modules are of interest: Defs - attribute definitions Attribute - setter/getter/helper functions MyTypeable - boilerplate DynamicMap - an interface to finite map

Here are the prototypical implementations:

module Defs where

data Gender = Masc | Fem | Neutr deriving (Eq, Show) data Accented = Accented deriving (Eq, Show) data Focused = Focused deriving (Eq, Show)

...

module Attribute ( Gender , gender, accented, focused , ggender, isAccented, isFocused ) where

import Defs import MyTypeable import DynamicMap ...

-- Segment is the manipulated structure, containing the attributes sattr :: (MyTypeable a) => a -> Segment -> Segment sattr a s = s { attrs = sattrW a (attrs s) }

sattrW :: (MyTypeable a) => a -> Attrs -> Attrs sattrW x = (flip addToDM) x

gattr :: (MyTypeable a) => Segment -> Maybe a gattr = gattrW . attrs

gattrW :: (MyTypeable a) => Attrs -> Maybe a gattrW = lookupDM

type GetAttr a = Segment -> Maybe a type SetAttr a = a -> Segment -> Segment

ggender = gattr :: GetAttr Gender gender = sattr :: SetAttr Gender

accented = sattr Accented focused = sattr Focused

isAccented, isFocused :: Segment -> Bool isAccented = isJust . (gattr::GetAttr Accented) isFocused = isJust . (gattr::GetAttr Focused)

...

module DynamicMap ( ... ) where -- shamelessly building on Hal Daumé's module

import Data.FiniteMap import MyTypeable

newtype DynamicMap = DM { unDM :: FiniteMap TypeRep TypeWrapper }

-- ignoring some obvious stuff (emptyDM, ...)

addToDM :: (MyTypeable a) => DynamicMap -> a -> DynamicMap addToDM (DM dm) a = DM $ addToFM dm (typeOf a) (toDyn a)

lookupDM :: MyTypeable a => DynamicMap -> Maybe a lookupDM (DM dm) :: Maybe a = case lookupFM dm (typeOf (undefined :: a)) of Nothing -> Nothing Just x -> fromDyn x

module MyTypeable where

import Defs

type TypeRep = Int

class MyTypeable a where typeOf :: a -> TypeRep toDyn :: a -> TypeWrapper fromDyn :: TypeWrapper -> Maybe a

-- === Start Of Automatic Generated Code ======================================= -- put in here automatic generated code -- === End Of Automatic Generated Code ========================================

-- The following generates the wrappers for the types. This is a very -- straightforward implementation, no need for optimization encountered. -- Call gentmp and put it in the "automatic generated code" section.

gentmp = writeFile "tmp.txt" (generateTypeWrappers typesToWrap)

typesToWrap = [ "Gender", "Accented", "Focused" ]

generateTypeWrappers = generateTypeWrappers' "" "" 0

generateTypeWrappers' :: String -- TypeWrapper accu -> String -- Instances accu -> Int -- current instance -> [String] -- list of types -> String -- code string

generateTypeWrappers' tpa ia n [] = "data TypeWrapper = StandInForEasierAutomaticGeneration\n" ++ tpa ++ "\n\n" ++ ia

generateTypeWrappers' tpa ia n (x:xs) = generateTypeWrappers' (tpa ++ wrap n x) (ia ++ inst n x) (n + 1) xs

-- make one wrap wrap n x = " | T" ++ show n ++ " " ++ x ++ "\n"

-- make one instance inst n x = "instance MyTypeable " ++ x ++ " where\n" ++ " typeOf _ = " ++ show n ++ "\n" ++ " toDyn = T" ++ show n ++ "\n" ++ " fromDyn (T" ++ show n ++ " x) = Just x\n" ++ " fromDyn _ = Nothing\n\n\n" _______________________________________________ Haskell mailing list Haskell@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell

-- Hal Daume III | hdaume@isi.edu "Arrest this man, he talks in maths." | www.isi.edu/~hdaume