[Haskell] SYB Documentation is inconclusive.

[Ralf Lammel]

Arthur,

constrFields eventually returns some mangled strings from the abstract syntax tree; see ghc-fptools/ghc/compiler/basicTypes/DataCon.lhs; and that abstract syntax promises to be order-preserving.

It says (not surprisingly):

       dcFields  :: [FieldLabel],
                -- Field labels for this constructor, in the
                -- same order as the argument types;
                -- length = 0 (if not a record) or dataConSourceArity.

gmapQ maps the children to results. Since it is a map, it is order-preserving. There is not even any associatively business in the case of gmapQ (as opposed to gmapQl and gmapQr).

So zipping together results from gmapQ and constrFields plus handling the special case of non-record types, should be just fine, no? What could possibly go wrong? Perhaps you are saying that the documentation of constrFields should promise explicitly that it does not mangle order?

Let me know if I don't get what you are after ... perhaps in the café.

Ralf


> -----Original Message-----
> From: haskell-bounces at haskell.org [mailto:haskell-bounces at haskell.org] On
> Behalf Of Arthur van Leeuwen
> Sent: Thursday, November 23, 2006 12:09 AM
> To: haskell at haskell.org
> Subject: [Haskell] SYB Documentation is inconclusive.
>
> L.S.,
>
> lately I've been playing with Data.Generics and records. I would like
> to write a generic method to output to e.g. CSV files. Given
> MissingH.CVS
> that problem reduces to a generic method to take lists of records to
> lists of lists with shown record fields, with as first element a list
> of the
> field names. That is, something quite like:
>
>  > totable :: [RecordType] -> [[String]]
>  > totable rs = fields (head rs) ++ map showrecord rs
>  >   where fields a = constrFields . head . dataTypeConstrs .
> dataTypeOf $ a
>  >        showrecord = gmapQ (show . toConstr)
>
> However, there are no guarantees whatsoever that the order of the
> fieldnames
> returned by constrFields corresponds to the order in which gmapQ returns
> the results for the children (that is the fields, in this case) of
> the records.
>
> Furthermore, I see no way of forcing such an order otherwise, other than
> writing boilerplate myself.
>
> So, is there something I just haven't seen in the lib yet, is something
> missing, or is just the documentation inconclusive and does the library
> behave as I want it to?
>
> Doei, Arthur.
>
> --
>
>    /\    / |       arthurvl at cs.uu.nl       | Work like you don't need
> the money
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>
>
>
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