[Haskell-cafe] computation over containers, greatly simplified notation.

Takayuki Muranushi muranushi at gmail.com
Sat Dec 1 01:43:47 CET 2012


Dear everyone,

After a number of attempts [1] I'm starting to think that my initial
approach was ill-directed.

After all, Functor, Applicative, Zip are three different classes.
Functors are type constructors where you can map unary functions over them.
Applicatives are those with map-over of zero-ary functions (pure,) unary
functions, binary functions, ternary functions, ... etc.
Zip are those with unary, binary, ternary ... mapover, but not zero-ary
map-over.

Repa Arrays and Vectors belong to Zip because there's no trivial unique way
to implement pure.

What the customer really needed [2] seems to be the following series of
functions:

forLiftZ1 :: Zip f => f a -> (a -> b) -> f b
forLiftZ2 :: Zip f => f a -> f b -> (a -> b -> c) -> f c

forLiftZ3 :: Zip f => f a -> f b -> f c -> (a -> b -> c -> d) -> f d

Now I'm trying if it's possible to implement the series in a single shot
[3] .

I'm reporting my progress for anyone who might be still thinking for me.
Thank you!!

[1] https://github.com/nushio3/practice/tree/master/free-objects
[2] http://www.projectcartoon.com/cartoon/3
[3] https://github.com/nushio3/practice/blob/master/free-objects/printf6.hs



2012/11/29 Takayuki Muranushi <muranushi at gmail.com>

> Dear all,
>
> I came up with an idea to greatly simplify some kinds of array
> computations. It should work well with many kinds of arrays. Is this new?
>
> https://gist.github.com/4162375
>
>
>
> These few days, I've been trying to rewrite a hydrodynamic simulation code
> that used Data.Vector (~250 lines), to Repa [1] . It seemed promising, but
> soon I realized that I needed to use Repa.map and Repa.zipWith almost
> everywhere. I need careful thinking to transform every lines (that used
> vector's indexing) to Repa's point-free stile. Is there any better ways?
>
> Then I realized that I was the author of Paraiso [2], a DSL for stencil
> computation. One of its feature is to write down array computation just as
> if it were scalar computation.
>
> Basically what I need is ZipList-like Applicative instances for vectors
> and Repa arrays. Why not they support ZipVector? Because 'pure' of zipList
> was an infinite list and you can't do infinite vectors. Then I came up with
> this idea.
>
> https://gist.github.com/4162375
>
> the wrapper W does several things: it represents the 'pure,' homogeneous
> array in a space-efficient manner, and also serves as a newtype-wrapper of
> Num (and possibly Fractional, Floating...) instances.
>
> Questions are: is this technology new? or promising? doomed?
> It seems to me like a free-Applicative, like the free-Monad theory. Are
> they related?
> The function 'backend' helps to mix in the non-zip-like computations. How
> can we remove the 'undefined' in the 'backend?'
> Some of Repa computations are Monads. W needs to be a monad transformer to
> incooperate this.
>
> Also I'm grateful to past cafe discussion on existing Zippable
> implementations [3][4] .
>
> [1] hackage.haskell.org/package/repa
> [2] http://hackage.haskell.org/package/Paraiso
> [3] http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2009-July/064403.html
> [4]
> http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/category-extras/latest/doc/html/Control-Functor-Zip.html
>
>
> --
> Takayuki MURANUSHI
> The Hakubi Center for Advanced Research, Kyoto University
> http://www.hakubi.kyoto-u.ac.jp/02_mem/h22/muranushi.html
>



-- 
Takayuki MURANUSHI
The Hakubi Center for Advanced Research, Kyoto University
http://www.hakubi.kyoto-u.ac.jp/02_mem/h22/muranushi.html
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