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...

This paper describes a general framework for designing purely functional datatypes that automatically satisfy given size or structural constraints. Using the framework we develop implementations of different matrix types (eg square matrices) and implementations of several tree types (eg Braun trees, 2-3 trees). Consider, for instance, representing square n \Theta n matrices. The usual representation using lists of lists fails to meet the structural constraints: there is no way to ensure that the outer list and the inner lists have the same length. The main idea of our approach is to solve in a first step a related, but simpler problem, namely to generate the multiset of all square numbers. In order to describe this multiset we employ recursion equations involving finite multisets, multiset union, addition and multiplication lifted to multisets. In a second step we mechanically derive datatype definitions from these recursion equations which enforce the `squareness' constraint. The tra...

Number systems serve admirably as templates for container types: a container object of size n is modelled after the representation of the number n and operations on container objects are modelled after their number-theoretic counterparts. Binomial queues are probably the first data structure that was designed with this analogy in mind. In this paper we show how to express these so-called numerical representations as higher-order nested datatypes. A nested datatype allows to capture the structural invariants of a numerical representation, so that the violation of an invariant can be detected at compile-time. We develop a programming method which allows to adapt algorithms to the new representation in a mostly straightforward manner. The framework is employed to implement three different container types: binary random-access lists, binomial queues, and 2-3 finger search trees. The latter data structure, which is treated in some depth, can be seen as the main innovation from a data-struct...

A famous algorithm is the Fast Fourier Transform, or FFT. An efficient iterative version of the FFT algorithm performs as a first step a bit-reversal permutation of the input list. The bit-reversal permutation swaps elements whose indices have binary representations that are the reverse of each other. Using an amortized approach this operation can be made to run in linear time on a random-access machine. An intriguing question is whether a linear-time implementation is also feasible on a pointer machine, that is in a purely functional setting. We show that the answer to this question is in the affirmative. In deriving a solution we employ several advanced programming language concepts such as nested datatypes, associated fold and unfold operators, rank-2 types, and polymorphic recursion. 1 Introduction A bit-reversal permutation operates on lists whose length is n = 2 k for some natural number k and swaps elements whose indices have binary representations that are the reverse of eac...