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: .