research-article

Testing type class laws

Authors:

Johan Jeuring,

Patrik Jansson,

Cláudio AmaralAuthors Info & Claims

Haskell '12: Proceedings of the 2012 Haskell Symposium

Pages 49 - 60

https://doi.org/10.1145/2364506.2364514

Published: 13 September 2012 Publication History

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Abstract

The specification of a class in Haskell often starts with stating, in comments, the laws that should be satisfied by methods defined in instances of the class, followed by the type of the methods of the class. This paper develops a framework that supports testing such class laws using QuickCheck. Our framework is a light-weight class law testing framework, which requires a limited amount of work per class law, and per datatype for which the class law is tested. We also show how to test class laws with partially-defined values. Using partially-defined values, we show that the standard lazy and strict implementations of the state monad do not satisfy the expected laws.

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Cited By

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Teegen FPrott KBunkenburg NHage J(2021)Haskell⁻¹: automatic function inversion in HaskellProceedings of the 14th ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on Haskell10.1145/3471874.3472982(41-55)Online publication date: 18-Aug-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3471874.3472982
BOTTA NBREDE NJANSSON PRICHTER T(2021)Extensional equality preservation and verified generic programmingJournal of Functional Programming10.1017/S095679682100020431Online publication date: 21-Oct-2021
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0956796821000204
Lochbihler A(2019)Effect Polymorphism in Higher-Order Logic (Proof Pearl)Journal of Automated Reasoning10.1007/s10817-018-9476-263:2(439-462)Online publication date: 1-Aug-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10817-018-9476-2
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Index Terms

Testing type class laws
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. General programming languages
      1. Language types
        Functional languages

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Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

Haskell '12: Proceedings of the 2012 Haskell Symposium

September 2012

168 pages

ISBN:9781450315746

DOI:10.1145/2364506

General Chair:
Janis Voigtländer
University of Bonn, Germany

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 47, Issue 12
Haskell '12
December 2012
157 pages
ISSN:0362-1340
EISSN:1558-1160
DOI:10.1145/2430532
Issue’s Table of Contents

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 13 September 2012

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ICFP'12

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SIGPLAN

ICFP'12: ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming

September 13, 2012

Copenhagen, Denmark

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Overall Acceptance Rate 57 of 143 submissions, 40%

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ICFP '25

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October 12 - 18, 2025

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Cited By

View all

Teegen FPrott KBunkenburg NHage J(2021)Haskell⁻¹: automatic function inversion in HaskellProceedings of the 14th ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on Haskell10.1145/3471874.3472982(41-55)Online publication date: 18-Aug-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3471874.3472982
BOTTA NBREDE NJANSSON PRICHTER T(2021)Extensional equality preservation and verified generic programmingJournal of Functional Programming10.1017/S095679682100020431Online publication date: 21-Oct-2021
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0956796821000204
Lochbihler A(2019)Effect Polymorphism in Higher-Order Logic (Proof Pearl)Journal of Automated Reasoning10.1007/s10817-018-9476-263:2(439-462)Online publication date: 1-Aug-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10817-018-9476-2
Arvidsson AJohansson MTouche R(2019)Proving Type Class Laws for HaskellMicrobial Metabolic Engineering10.1007/978-3-030-14805-8_4(61-74)Online publication date: 21-Feb-2019
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14805-8_4
Lochbihler A(2017)Effect Polymorphism in Higher-Order Logic (Proof Pearl)Interactive Theorem Proving10.1007/978-3-319-66107-0_25(389-409)Online publication date: 2017
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66107-0_25
Farmer ASculthorpe NGill A(2015)Reasoning with the HERMIT: tool support for equational reasoning on GHC core programsACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/2887747.280430350:12(23-34)Online publication date: 30-Aug-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2887747.2804303
Farmer ASculthorpe NGill ALippmeier B(2015)Reasoning with the HERMIT: tool support for equational reasoning on GHC core programsProceedings of the 2015 ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Haskell10.1145/2804302.2804303(23-34)Online publication date: 30-Aug-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2804302.2804303
Holdermans SPeña RSchrijvers T(2013)Random testing of purely functional abstract datatypesProceedings of the 15th Symposium on Principles and Practice of Declarative Programming10.1145/2505879.2505880(275-284)Online publication date: 16-Sep-2013
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2505879.2505880
Esterhuyse Cvan Binsbergen LLaemmel RPereira JMosses P(2024)Cooperative Specification via Composition ControlProceedings of the 17th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Software Language Engineering10.1145/3687997.3695635(2-15)Online publication date: 17-Oct-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3687997.3695635
Christiansen JDylus SBunkenburg NEisenberg R(2019)Verifying effectful Haskell programs in CoqProceedings of the 12th ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on Haskell10.1145/3331545.3342592(125-138)Online publication date: 8-Aug-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3331545.3342592

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