Concept:
Scrap your boilerplate
Headline
A generic programming style
Illustration
"Scrap Your Boilerplate" (SYB) refers to a generic programming style where highly polymorphic function combinators are leveraged in assembling data-processing operations that recurse into compound data while being customized by type-specific cases. Consider the following implementation of Feature:Cut as part of Contribution:haskellSyb:
cut :: Company -> Company
cut = everywhere (extT id (/(2::Float)))
everywhere is a highly polymorphic function combinator which takes a polymorphic argument function to transform all immediate and non-immediate subterms of a given term of possibly any type. The actual traversal is provided by everywhere; the per-subterm functionality is to be described by the polymorphic argument of everywhere. Thus, the following type is needed:
everywhere :: forall a. Data a => (forall b. Data b => b -> b) -> a -> a
In the Haskell context, the combinators for SYB turn out to be polymorphic in an interesting manner from a typing perspective: they are rank-2 polymorphic and customization requires a form of type case. The rank-2 status can be observed in the above function signature: the inner "forall" is to the left of a function arrow. The use of type case is evident from the above application of everywhere. In particular, extT models type case such that the type-specific second argument is applied when possible and otherwise the generic first argument is applied. In general terms, extT g s x translates to s x if the argument type of s equals (or generalizes) the type of x; otherwise extT g s x translates to g x.
SYB has been conceived in a Haskell setting, but the style has been applied to other programming languages as well. SYB is particularly helpful in describing all kinds of transformations and queries for compound data in a concise manner, without involving conceptually irrelevant details of the data structures involved.
Kevin
edited this article at
Thu, 09 Mar 2017 03:21:02 +0100
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