An XML data binding is a translation of XML documents into values of some programming language. This paper discusses a type-preserving XML-Haskell data binding that handles documents typed by the W3C XML Schema standard. Our translation is based on a formal semantics of Schema, and has been proved sound with respect to the semantics. We also show a program in Generic Haskell that constructs parsers specialized to a particular Schema type.

Datatypes which di#er inessentially in their names and structure are said to be isomorphic; for example, a ternary product is isomorphic to a nested pair of binary products. In some canonical cases, the conversion function is uniquely determined solely by the two types involved.

Abstract. The last decade has seen a number of approaches to datatype-generic programming: PolyP, Functorial ML, ‘Scrap Your Boilerplate’, Generic Haskell, ‘Generics for the Masses’, etc. The approaches vary in sophistication and target audience: some propose full-blown programming languages, some suggest libraries, some can be seen as categorical programming methods. In these lecture notes we compare the various approaches to datatype-generic programming in Haskell. We introduce each approach by means of example, and we evaluate it along different dimensions (expressivity, ease of use, etc). 1

When constructing programs to process XML documents, we immediately face the question as to how XML documents should be represented internally in the programming language we use. Currently, most representations for XML documents are typeless in the sense that the type information of an XML document cannot be reflected in the type of the representation of the document (if the representation is assumed to be typed). Though convenient to construct, a typeless representation for XML documents often makes use of a large number of representation tags, which not only require some significant amount of space to store but may also incur numerous run-time tag checks when the represented documents are processed. Moreover, with a typeless representation for XML documents, it becomes di#cult or even impossible to statically capture program invariants that are related to the type information of XML documents. Building upon our recent work on guarded recursive datatypes, we present an approach to representing XML documents in this paper that not only allows the type information of an XML document to be reflected in the type of the representation of the document but also significantly reduces the need for representation tags that are required in typeless representations. With this approach, we become able to process XML documents in a typeful manner, thus reaping various well-known software engineering benefits from the presence of types.

Abstract. Polytypic functional programming has the advantage that it can derive code for generic functions automatically. However, it is not clear whether it is useful for anything other than the textbook examples, and the generated polytypic code is usually too slow for real-life programs. As a real-life test, we derive a polytypic parser for the Haskell 98 syntax and look into other front-end compiler syntax tree operations. We present a types–as–grammar approach, which uses polytypic programming (in both Generic Haskell and Clean) to automatically derive the code for a parser based on the syntax tree type, without using external tools. Moreover, we show that using polytypic programming can even be useful for data–specific syntax tree operations in a (functional) compiler, such as scope checking and type inference. Simple speed tests show that the performance of polytypic parsers can be abominable for real-life inputs. However, we show that much performance can be recovered by applying (extended) fusion optimization on the generated code. We actually have a derived parser whose speed is close to one generated by a specialized Haskell parser generator. 1