The Comonad.Reader

I've been transcoding a lot of Haskell to Scheme lately and one of the things that I found myself needing was a macro for dealing with Currying of functions in a way that handles partial and over-application cleanly.

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I was asked to give two talks at the Boston Area Haskell User Group for this past Tuesday. The first was pitched at a more introductory level and the second was to go deeper into what I have been using monoids for lately.

The first talk covers an introduction to the mathematical notion of a monoid, introduces some of the features of my Haskell monoids library on hackage, and starts to motivate the use of monoidal parallel/incremental parsing, and the modification use of compression algorithms to recycle monoidal results.

The second talk covers a way to generate a locally-context sensitive parallel/incremental parser by modifying Iteratees to enable them to drive a Parsec 3 lexer, and then wrapping that in a monoid based on error productions in the grammar before recycling these techniques at a higher level to deal with parsing seemingly stateful structures, such as Haskell layout.

1. Introduction To Monoids (PDF)
2. Iteratees, Parsec and Monoids: A Parsing Trifecta (PDF)

Due to a late start, I was unable to give the second talk. However, I did give a quick run through to a few die-hards who stayed late and came to the Cambridge Brewing Company afterwards. As I promised some people that I would post the slides after the talk, here they are.

The current plan is to possibly give the second talk in full at either the September or October Boston Haskell User Group sessions, depending on scheduling and availability.

[ Iteratee.hs ]

I have updated the reflection package on hackage to use an idea for avoiding dummy arguments posted to the Haskell cafe mailing list by Bertram Felgenhauer, which adapts nicely to the case of handling Reflection. The reflection package implements the ideas from the Functional Pearl: Implicit Configurations paper by Oleg Kiselyov and Chung-chieh Shan.

Now, you no longer need to use big scary undefineds throughout your code and can instead program with implicit configurations more naturally, using Applicative and Monad sugar.

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