The Data class comprehends a fundamental primitive gfoldl for
folding over constructor applications, say terms. This primitive can
be instantiated in several ways to map over the immediate subterms
of a term; see the gmap combinators later in this class. Indeed, a
generic programmer does not necessarily need to use the ingenious gfoldl
primitive but rather the intuitive gmap combinators. The gfoldl
primitive is completed by means to query top-level constructors, to
turn constructor representations into proper terms, and to list all
possible datatype constructors. This completion allows us to serve
generic programming scenarios like read, show, equality, term generation.
The combinators gmapT, gmapQ, gmapM, etc are all provided with
default definitions in terms of gfoldl, leaving open the opportunity
to provide datatype-specific definitions.
(The inclusion of the gmap combinators as members of class Data
allows the programmer or the compiler to derive specialised, and maybe
more efficient code per datatype. Note: gfoldl is more higher-order
than the gmap combinators. This is subject to ongoing benchmarking
experiments. It might turn out that the gmap combinators will be
moved out of the class Data.)
Conceptually, the definition of the gmap combinators in terms of the
primitive gfoldl requires the identification of the gfoldl function
arguments. Technically, we also need to identify the type constructor
c for the construction of the result type from the folded term type.
In the definition of gmapQx combinators, we use phantom type
constructors for the c in the type of gfoldl because the result type
of a query does not involve the (polymorphic) type of the term argument.
In the definition of gmapQl we simply use the plain constant type
constructor because gfoldl is left-associative anyway and so it is
readily suited to fold a left-associative binary operation over the
immediate subterms. In the definition of gmapQr, extra effort is
needed. We use a higher-order accumulation trick to mediate between
left-associative constructor application vs. right-associative binary
operation (e.g., (:)). When the query is meant to compute a value
of type r, then the result type withing generic folding is r -> r.
So the result of folding is a function to which we finally pass the
right unit.
With the -XDeriveDataTypeable option, GHC can generate instances of the
Data class automatically. For example, given the declaration
data T a b = C1 a b | C2 deriving (Typeable, Data)
GHC will generate an instance that is equivalent to
instance (Data a, Data b) => Data (T a b) where
gfoldl k z (C1 a b) = z C1 `k` a `k` b
gfoldl k z C2 = z C2
gunfold k z c = case constrIndex c of
1 -> k (k (z C1))
2 -> z C2
toConstr (C1 _ _) = con_C1
toConstr C2 = con_C2
dataTypeOf _ = ty_T
con_C1 = mkConstr ty_T "C1" [] Prefix
con_C2 = mkConstr ty_T "C2" [] Prefix
ty_T = mkDataType "Module.T" [con_C1, con_C2]
This is suitable for datatypes that are exported transparently.
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