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.

A generic program is written once and works on values of many data types. Generic Haskell is a recent extension of the functional programming language Haskell that supports generic programming. This paper discusses how Generic Haskell can be used to implement XML tools whose behaviour depends on the DTD or Schema of the input XML document. Example tools include XML editors, databases, and compressors. Generic Haskell is ideally suited for implementing XML tools: .

Unfolds generate data structures, and folds consume them.

We show how the binary encoding and decoding of typed data and typed programs can be understood, programmed, and verified with the help of question-answer games. The encoding of a value is determined by the yes/no answers to a sequence of questions about that value; conversely, decoding is the interpretation of binary data as answers to the same question scheme. We introduce a general framework for writing and verifying gamebased codecs. We present games for structured, recursive, polymorphic, and indexed types, building up to a representation of well-typed terms in the simply-typed λ-calculus. The framework makes novel use of isomorphisms between types in the definition of games. The definition of isomorphisms together with additional simple properties make it easy to prove that codecs derived from games never encode two distinct values using the same code, never decode two codes to the same value, and interpret any bit sequence as a valid code for a value or as a prefix of a valid code.

Unfolds generate data structures, and folds consume them. A hylomorphism is a fold after an unfold, generating then consuming a virtual data structure. A metamorphism is the opposite composition, an unfold after a fold; typically, it will convert from one data representation to another. In general, metamorphisms are less interesting than hylomorphisms: there is no automatic fusion to deforest the intermediate virtual data structure. However, under certain conditions fusion is possible: some of the work of the unfold can be done before all of the work of the fold is complete. This permits streaming metamorphisms, and among other things allows conversion of infinite data representations. We present a theory of metamorphisms and outline some examples.