Abstract not found

The study of inductive and coinductive types (like finite lists and streams, respectively) is usually conducted within the framework of category theory, which to all intents and purposes is a theory of sets and functions between sets. Allegory theory, an extension of category theory due to Freyd, is better suited to modelling relations between sets as opposed to functions between sets. The question thus arises of how to extend the standard categorical results on the existence of final objects in categories (for example, coalgebras and products) to their existence in allegories. The motivation is to streamline current work on generic programming, in which the use of a relational theory rather than a functional theory has proved to be desirable. In this paper, we define the notion of a relational final dialgebra and prove, for an important class of dialgebras, that a relational final dialgebra exists in an allegory if and only if a final dialgebra exists in the underlying category of map...

Abstract Many functions have to be written over and over again for different datatypes, either because datatypes change during the development of programs, or because functions with similar functionality are needed on different datatypes. Examples of such functions are pretty printers, pattern matchers, equality functions, unifiers, rewriting functions, etc. Such functions are called polytypic functions. A polytypic function is a function that is defined by induction on the structure of user-defined datatypes. This thesis introduces polytypic functions, shows how to construct and reason about polytypic functions and describes the implementation of the polytypic programming system PolyP. PolyP extends a functional language (a subset of Haskell) with a construct for writing polytypic functions. The extended language type checks definitions of polytypic functions, and infers the types of all other expressions. Programs in the extended language are translated to Haskell.

Nested datatypes are a generalisation of the class of regular datatypes, which includes familiar datatypes like trees and lists. They typically represent constraints on the values of regular datatypes and are therefore used to minimise the scope for programmer error.

Abstract: A generic function is a function that is defined on the structure of data types: with a single definition, we obtain a function that works for many data types. In contrast, an ad-hoc polymorphic function requires a separate implementation for each data type. Previous work by Hinze on lightweight generic programming has introduced techniques that allow the definition of generic functions directly in Haskell. A severe drawback of these approaches is that generic functions, once defined, cannot be extended with ad-hoc behaviour for new data types, precluding the design of an extensible and modular generic programming library based on these techniques. In this paper, we present a revised version of Hinze’s Generics for the masses approach that overcomes this limitation. Using our new technique, writing an extensible and modular generic programming library in Haskell 98 is possible. 1.1