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A trie is a search tree scheme that employs the structure of search keys to organize information. Tries were originally devised as a means to represent a collection of records indexed by strings over a fixed alphabet. Based on work by C.P. Wadsworth and others, R.H. Connelly and F.L. Morris generalized the concept to permit indexing by elements of an arbitrary monomorphic datatype. Here we go one step further and define tries and operations on tries generically for arbitrary first-order polymorphic datatypes. The derivation is based on techniques recently developed in the context of polytypic programming. It is well known that for the implementation of generalized tries nested datatypes and polymorphic recursion are needed. Implementing tries for polymorphic datatypes places even greater demands on the type system: it requires rank-2 type signatures and higher-order polymorphic nested datatypes. Despite these requirements the definition of generalized tries for polymorphic datatypes is...

Generic Haskell is an extension of Haskell that supports the construction of generic programs. These lecture notes discuss three advanced generic programming applications: generic dictionaries, compressing XML documents, and the zipper: a data structure used to represent a tree together with a subtree that is the focus of attention, where that focus may move left, right, up or down the tree. When describing and implementing these examples, we will encounter some advanced features of Generic Haskell, such as type-indexed data types, dependencies between and generic abstractions of generic functions, adjusting a generic function using a default case, and generic functions with a special case for a particular constructor.