Article

Scrap more boilerplate: reflection, zips, and generalised casts

Authors:

Simon Peyton JonesAuthors Info & Claims

ICFP '04: Proceedings of the ninth ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Functional programming

Pages 244 - 255

https://doi.org/10.1145/1016850.1016883

Published: 19 September 2004 Publication History

Abstract

Writing boilerplate code is a royal pain. Generic programming promises to alleviate this pain by allowing the programmer to write a generic "recipe" for boilerplate code, and use that recipe in many places. In earlier work we introduced the "Scrap your boilerplate" approach to generic programming, which exploits Haskell's existing type-class mechanism to support generic transformations and queries.This paper completes the picture. We add a few extra "introspective" or "reflective" facilities, that together support a rich variety of serialisation and de-serialisation. We also show how to perform generic "zips", which at first appear to be somewhat tricky in our framework. Lastly, we generalise the ability to over-ride a generic function with a type-specific one.All of this can be supported in Haskell with independently-useful extensions: higher-rank types and type-safe cast. The GHC implementation of Haskell readily derives the required type classes for user-defined data types.

References

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Cited By

Pickering MLöh AWu NSchrijvers T(2020)Staged sums of productsProceedings of the 13th ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on Haskell10.1145/3406088.3409021(122-135)Online publication date: 27-Aug-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3406088.3409021
Kramer LKaminski TVan Wyk ESchaefer IReichenbach CStorm T(2019)Reflection in attribute grammarsProceedings of the 18th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Generative Programming: Concepts and Experiences10.1145/3357765.3359517(48-60)Online publication date: 21-Oct-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3357765.3359517
Kiss CPickering MWu N(2018)Generic deriving of generic traversalsProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/32367802:ICFP(1-30)Online publication date: 30-Jul-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3236780
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Index Terms

Scrap more boilerplate: reflection, zips, and generalised casts
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software development techniques
      1. Reusability
  2. Software notations and tools
2. Theory of computation
  1. Formal languages and automata theory

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

ICFP '04: Proceedings of the ninth ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Functional programming

September 2004

264 pages

ISBN:1581139055

DOI:10.1145/1016850

General Chair:
Chris Okasaki
United States Military Academy, West Point
,
Program Chair:
Kathleen Fisher
AT&T Labs Research

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 39, Issue 9
ICFP '04
September 2004
254 pages
ISSN:0362-1340
EISSN:1558-1160
DOI:10.1145/1016848
Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2004 ACM.

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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Published: 19 September 2004

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ICFP04: ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming

September 19 - 21, 2004

UT, Snow Bird, USA

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Overall Acceptance Rate 333 of 1,064 submissions, 31%

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Cited By

Pickering MLöh AWu NSchrijvers T(2020)Staged sums of productsProceedings of the 13th ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on Haskell10.1145/3406088.3409021(122-135)Online publication date: 27-Aug-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3406088.3409021
Kramer LKaminski TVan Wyk ESchaefer IReichenbach CStorm T(2019)Reflection in attribute grammarsProceedings of the 18th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Generative Programming: Concepts and Experiences10.1145/3357765.3359517(48-60)Online publication date: 21-Oct-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3357765.3359517
Kiss CPickering MWu N(2018)Generic deriving of generic traversalsProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/32367802:ICFP(1-30)Online publication date: 30-Jul-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3236780
Broman DSiek J(2018)Gradually typed symbolic expressionsProceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN Workshop on Partial Evaluation and Program Manipulation - PEPM '1810.1145/3175493.3162068(15-29)Online publication date: 2018
https://doi.org/10.1145/3175493.3162068
Broman DSiek JHenglein FKo H(2017)Gradually typed symbolic expressionsProceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN Workshop on Partial Evaluation and Program Manipulation10.1145/3162068(15-29)Online publication date: 25-Dec-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3162068
Yallop J(2017)Staged generic programmingProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/31102731:ICFP(1-29)Online publication date: 29-Aug-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3110273
Oliveira BMu SYou S(2015)Modular reifiable matching: a list-of-functors approach to two-level typesACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/2887747.280431550:12(82-93)Online publication date: 30-Aug-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2887747.2804315
Zhang HChu ZOliveira BStorm T(2015)Scrap your boilerplate with object algebrasACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/2858965.281427950:10(127-146)Online publication date: 23-Oct-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2858965.2814279
Zhang HChu ZOliveira BStorm TAldrich JEugster P(2015)Scrap your boilerplate with object algebrasProceedings of the 2015 ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications10.1145/2814270.2814279(127-146)Online publication date: 23-Oct-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2814270.2814279
Oliveira BMu SYou SLippmeier B(2015)Modular reifiable matching: a list-of-functors approach to two-level typesProceedings of the 2015 ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Haskell10.1145/2804302.2804315(82-93)Online publication date: 30-Aug-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2804302.2804315
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