[Haskell-cafe] Efficient object identity (aka symbols as data)

Gregory Collins greg at gregorycollins.net
Thu May 26 15:56:08 CEST 2011


Based on the description it looks like you could be looking for:

    http://hackage.haskell.org/package/simple-atom

G

On Thu, May 26, 2011 at 10:45 AM, Jacek Generowicz
<jacek.generowicz at cern.ch> wrote:
> [ TLDR: How do you do Lisp symbols in Haskell? ]
>
>
> What is the Haskell approach to efficient comparison and lookup of objects
> by their identity?
>
> Maybe a toy example would help to explain what I mean.
>
> Imagine that I want to use Haskell to maximize happiness in a situation
> where a bunch of people have to be assigned to certain groups according to
> their preferences, and some constraints on the group sizes. Conceptually my
> input data might be structured as follows:
>
> data Group = Group GroupName MaxGroupSize
> data Person = Person Name Group Group Group
>
> The program should partition the people into groups, attempting to get
> everyone into their most favoured groups.
>
> Whatever algorithm I choose to use for the optimization, will have to do
> lots of comparisons of Groups and Persons where their *identity* is all that
> matters: you don't need to look inside the objects. On the other hand,
> sometimes we will have to look inside the objects, for example in order to
> answer queries such as "Which group did Johnny get and how far down his list
> of choices did that group feature?".
>
> I should be able to run the program on data that becomes available at run
> time.
>
> The lisper in me is crying out for (lisp-like-)symbols which I can create
> from the input data at run time and on which some extra information can be
> hung. How would I organize something like this in Haskell?
>
>
> Thanks.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Haskell-Cafe mailing list
> Haskell-Cafe at haskell.org
> http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
>



-- 
Gregory Collins <greg at gregorycollins.net>



More information about the Haskell-Cafe mailing list