September 2012 - Libraries

Proposal: Use time rather than old-time in directory
by Ian Lynagh 17 Sep '14

17 Sep '14

Hi all, This proposal is to change directory to use the time package rather than the old-time package. This will hopefully be a significant step towards actually making the transition in general. I'm not sure if POSIXTime or UTCTime is the better type to use. Does anyone know? I started off with UTCTime, then switched to POSIXTime as UTCTime didn't have a Show instance. I've since found that actually UTCTime has both Show and Read instances, but they are orphaned. So actually, if UTCTime is the better type then switching back to UTCTime would allow us to fix this comment in hpc: -- We would rather use ClockTime in Mix, but ClockTime has no Read instance and simplify the code slightly. Attached are patches for directory, hpc and ghc. Suggested discussion period: Until 5th Nov 2011. Thanks Ian

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Re: Proposal: Add hasBitSize to Data.Bits.Bits
by John Lato 19 Sep '13

19 Sep '13

> From: Edward Kmett <ekmett(a)gmail.com> > > On Fri, Jul 27, 2012 at 3:42 PM, Ian Lynagh <igloo(a)earth.li> wrote: > >> On Fri, Jul 27, 2012 at 03:06:04PM -0400, Edward Kmett wrote: >> > There is currently no way to know whether or not calling >> > Data.Bits.bitSizewill crash your program. >> > >> > I propose extending the Bits class to include: >> > >> > hasBitSize :: Bits b => b -> Bool >> > >> > such that it returns False for Integer and True for the other instances > > Would it be better to move bitSize into a separate class? > > > I don't think so. Ultimately, you should be able to know for every numeric > type if it has a fixed or variable number of bits. In a perfect world 'd > rather just have bitSize return a Maybe that way we don't have to truck > with partial functions in the API. > > However, the case for just adding hasBitSize is that it avoids breaking > existing code. Given that existing code using bitSize can already cause a crash when used with Integer or other infinite types, wouldn't it be better to break existing code so authors can fix (or at least examine) their use of bitSize? I'm in favor of changing the type of bitSize, although since none of my code uses that function it's an easy position for me to take. John L.

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PolyKinds, Control.Category and GHC 7.6.1
by Edward Kmett 30 May '13

30 May '13

Would it be possible to add something like {-# LANGUAGE CPP #-} #if defined(__GLASGOW_HASKELL__) && __GLASGOW_HASKELL__ >= 704 {-# LANGUAGE PolyKinds #-} #endif to the top of Control.Category before the 7.6.1 final release? Control.Category.Category is pretty much the only type in base that directly benefits from PolyKinds without any code changes, but without enabling the extension there nobody can define categories for kinds other than *, and most interesting categories actually have more exotic kinds. I only noticed that it wasn't there in the release candidate just now. -Edward Kmett

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A more useful Monoid instance for Data.Map
by Daniel Peebles 13 Mar '13

13 Mar '13

Hi all, Currently Data.Map has a Monoid instance, but it's rather lossy and not as general as it could be: instance (Ord k) => Monoid (Map k v) where mempty = empty mappend = union mconcat = unions The instance would be much nicer if it required a Monoid on v and used unionWith mappend instead of just union. The current behavior could be emulated by using First/Last as the Monoid (or ideally a semigroup, but that's or another discussion), but other more interesting Monoid instances could also be used for the values. I realize that changing instances could break code, but I'd be curious to see how many people even use the current monoid instance. Does anyone have any system for testing hypotheses like this (by typechecking a large randomized chunk of hackage or something)? It looks like the idea has been around for at least five years: http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/1460 but the proposal was abandoned, so I wanted to see if I could get people to start talking about it again. Thanks, Dan

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Proposal: refactor Arrow class
by Ross Paterson 10 Jan '13

10 Jan '13

I propose to refactor the Arrow class, so that GHC's arrow notation can be a bit more general. (The module Control.Arrow itself would remain standard Haskell.) Please comment by 12th August. In detail, the proposal is to change the Arrow class from class Category a => Arrow a where arr :: (b -> c) -> a b c first :: a b c -> a (b,d) (c,d) -- various functions made methods to allow efficient specializations by introducing a new class -- | A binary type constructor that is contravariant in its first argument, -- that is, -- -- * @'premap' id a = a@ -- -- * @'premap' (f . g) a = 'premap' g ('premap' f a)@ -- class PreArrow a where premap :: (b -> b') -> a b' c -> a b c with instances instance PreArrow (->) where premap f g = g . f instance PreArrow (Kleisli m) where premap f (Kleisli g) = Kleisli (g . f) and redefining the Arrow class as class (Category a, PreArrow a) => Arrow a where arr :: (b -> c) -> a b c arr f = premap f id first :: a b c -> a (b,d) (c,d) -- rest unchanged The proposed PreArrow class has more instances than Arrow, in particular composing a PreArrow with a Functor yields another PreArrow. The principal client for the new class would be the arrow notation, as implemented in GHC. With this class, there would be a simple rule for determining which instances are needed, based on the keywords used: * all commands ("proc" and operator arguments) need PreArrow * "do" needs Arrow * "rec" needs ArrowLoop * "case" or "if" need ArrowChoice One might object that the second argument of the PreArrow class is superfluous, and this is just a complicated Contravariant class. That is true, and in semantic terms a covariant functor would be sufficient, but Haskell's type system makes it impossible to have commonality between a Contravariant class of unary type constructors and the Arrow class used by arrow notation.

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Changes to Typeable
by Simon Peyton-Jones 26 Nov '12

26 Nov '12

Friends (Ian pointed out that I should have sent this to the libraries list): The page describes an improved implementation of the Typeable class, making use of polymorphic kinds. Technically it is straightforward, but it represents a non-backward-compatible change to a widely used library, so we need to make a plan for the transition. http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/GhcKinds/PolyTypeable Comments? You can fix typos or add issues directly in the wiki page, or discuss by email Simon

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Proposal: Allow gunfold for Data.Map, Data.IntMap, etc.
by Edward Kmett 22 Nov '12

22 Nov '12

I would like to propose improving the Data instances for a number of currently completely opaque data types in the containers package, by using virtual constructors. The instance for Data.Map already uses fromList for gfoldl, it just stops there. Extending it to be able to gunfold and mention the name of that constructor would enable generic traversal libraries like uniplate, etc. to work over the contents of the Map, rather than bailing out in fear or crashing at the sight of a mkNoRepType. An example of the changes for Data.Map are highlighted below. instance (Data k, Data a, Ord k) => Data (Map k a) where gfoldl f z m = z fromList `f` toList m toConstr _ = fromListConstr gunfold k z c = case constrIndex c of 1 -> k (z fromList) _ -> error "gunfold" dataTypeOf _ = mapDataType dataCast2 f = gcast2 f fromListConstr :: Constr fromListConstr = mkConstr mapDataType "fromList" [] Prefix mapDataType :: DataType mapDataType = mkDataType "Data.Map.Map" [fromListConstr] I've used this approach for years on my own libraries to great effect. Discussion Period: 3 Weeks (I added a week for ICFP) -Edward

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Proposal: Remove Control.Concurrent{QSem,QSemN,,SampleVar,mergeIO,nmergeIO} from base
by Ian Lynagh 13 Nov '12

13 Nov '12

Hi all, I propose that we remove Control.Concurrent.QSem Control.Concurrent.QSemN Control.Concurrent.SampleVar Control.Concurrent.mergeIO Control.Concurrent.nmergeIO from base. Rationale: There is no real need for them to be in base, and they are not being well-maintained there (e.g. see [3160]). Chris Kuklewicz has already made a SafeSemaphore package that provides fixed versions of the 3 modules. Patch is attached (but basically it just removes the above). Suggested discussion deadline: Fri 22 June 2012. [3160] http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/3160 Thanks Ian

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Time to add the Traversable laws to the Documentation
by roconnor＠theorem.ca 30 Oct '12

30 Oct '12

Based on recent work of Edward Kmett and myself and older work by Twan van Laarhoven, we have derived a set of laws for Traversable that are essentially the same to the Laws given by Jeremey Gibbons, Bruno Oliveria in "The Essence of the Iterator Pattern" and which are again the same as the laws given by Mauro Jaskelioff and Ondrej Rypacek in "An Investigation of the Laws of Traversals". With such wide spread agreement going back at least 6 years, I think it is time to add the following 2 laws to the documentation for Data.Traversable.Traversable. (1) traverse Identity == Identity (2) traverse (Compose . fmap g . f) == Compose . fmap (traverse g) . traverse f (and adding a link to the paper titled "An Investigation of the Laws of Traversals" is probably also worthwhile.) In some publications you will see law 1 written as traverse (Identity . f) == Identity . fmap f This is form is equivalent to law 1 by parametricity. Another alterantive formulation of law 1 is traverse pure == pure which is equivalent to law 1 by the Applicative typeclass parametricity. I can provide short proofs of these two equivalences on demand. Of these different formulations of law (1), I think "traverse Identity == Identity" is the nicest because it is concise, mirrors the analogous functor law, and Identity is the natural identity element for Compose. But more importantly, some choice of formal specification of the traversal laws needs to be added to the documentation. -- Russell O'Connor <http://r6.ca/> ``All talk about `theft,''' the general counsel of the American Graphophone Company wrote, ``is the merest claptrap, for there exists no property in ideas musical, literary or artistic, except as defined by statute.''

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Strictness of modify in Control.Monad.State.Strict
by Ben Gamari 12 Oct '12

12 Oct '12

Is there a reason there is no `modify` operation in Control.Monad.State.Strict (and the transformers analogue) which is truly strict in the state? That is, modify' :: Monad m => (a -> a) -> StateM a m () modify' f = get >>= (\x -> put $! f x) While this is admittedly not a difficult piece of code to write, even the suggestion in the documentation that `modify` isn't as strict as one might think would likely save many man-hours of debugging (especially for those who are less familiar with the language, for whom, speaking from experience, strictness issues can pose a major hurdle to adoption) In general it would be nice if the notion of strictness were better addressed in the major libraries' documentation. It's a nuanced issue which is not fully captured by a ".Lazy" or ".Strict" in the module name. Just a thought. Thanks, - Ben

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