The Comonad.Reader

Andrej Bauer recently gave a really nice talk on how you can exploit side-effects to make a faster version of Martin Escardo's pseudo-paradoxical combinators.

A video of his talk is available over on his blog, and his presentation is remarkably clear, and would serve as a good preamble to the code I'm going to present below.

Andrej gave a related invited talk back at MSFP 2008 in Iceland, and afterwards over lunch I cornered him (with Dan Piponi) and explained how you could use parametricity to close over the side-effects of monads (or arrows, etc) but I think that trick was lost in the chaos of the weekend, so I've chosen to resurrect it here, and improve it to handle some of his more recent performance enhancements, and show that you don't need side-effects to speed up the search after all!

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Last time we derived an entailment relation for constraints, now let's get some use out of it.

Reflecting Classes and Instances

Most of the implications we use on a day to day basis come from our class and instance declarations, but last time we only really dealt with constraint products.

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Max Bolingbroke has done a wonderful job on adding Constraint kinds to GHC.

Constraint Kinds adds a new kind Constraint, such that Eq :: * -> Constraint, Monad :: (* -> *) -> Constraint, but since it is a kind, we can make type families for constraints, and even parameterize constraints on constraints.

So, let's play with them and see what we can come up with!

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Today I hope to start a new series of posts exploring constructive abstract algebra in Haskell.

In particular, I want to talk about a novel encoding of linear functionals, polynomials and linear maps in Haskell, but first we're going to have to build up some common terminology.

Having obtained the blessing of Wolfgang Jeltsch, I replaced the algebra package on hackage with something... bigger, although still very much a work in progress.

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I gave a talk last night at Boston Haskell on finger trees.

In particular I spent a lot of time focusing on how to derive the construction of Hinze and Paterson's 2-3 finger trees via an extended detour into a whole menagerie of tree types, and less on particular applications of the final resulting structure.

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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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Updated my little type-level 2s and 16s complement integer library to be ghc 6.6 friendly and uploaded it to hackage based on popular (er.. ok, well, singular) demand.

O.K. it was more of a polite request, but I did update it.