This paper is an attempt to persuade you of my viewpoint by presenting a novel generic program for a certain class of optimisation problems, named sequential decision processes. This class was originally identified by Richard Bellman in his pioneering work on dynamic programming [4]. It is a perfect example of a class of problems which are very much alike, but which has until now escaped solution by a single program. Those readers who have followed some of the work that Richard Bird and I have been doing over the last five years [6, 7] will recognise many individual examples: all of these have now been unified. The point of this observation is that even when you are on the lookout for generic programs, it can take a rather long time to discover them. The presentation below will follow that earlier work, by referring to the calculus of relations and the relational theory of data types. I shall however attempt to be light on the formalism, as I do not regard it as essential to the main thesis of this paper. Undoubtedly there are other (perhaps more convenient) notations in which the same ideas could be developed. This paper does assume some degree of familiarity with a lazy functional programming language such as Haskell, Hope, Miranda

This paper explores the idea of generic programming in which programs are parameterised by data types. Part of the constructive theory of lists, specically the part dealing with properties of segments, is generalised in two ways: from lists to arbitrary inductive data types, and from functions to relations. The new theory is used to solve a generic problem about segments. 1 Introduction To what extent is it possible to construct programs without knowing exactly what data types are involved? At rst sight this may seem a strange question, but consider the case of pattern matching. Over lists, this problem can be formulated in terms of two strings, a pattern and a text; the object is to determine if and where the pattern occurs as a segment of the text. Now, pattern matching can be generalised to other data types, including arrays and trees of various kinds; the essential step is to be able to dene the notion of `segment' in these types. So the intriguing question arises: can one...