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AGeneric Deriving Mechanism For Haskell

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Date: 2010-09-16

Time: 11:45

Room: BBL-079

----+++++ Speaker: [[http://www.cs.uu.nl/staff/jpm.html][José Pedro Magalhães]]

----+++++ Title: A generic deriving mechanism for Haskell

----+++++  Abstract

Haskell's deriving mechanism supports the automatic generation of instances
for a number of functions. The Haskell 98 Report only specifies how to generate
instances for the Eq, Ord, Enum, Bounded, Show, and Read classes.
The description of how to generate instances is largely informal. The generation
of instances imposes restrictions on the shape of datatypes, depending on the
particular class to derive. As a consequence, the portability of instances
across different compilers is not guaranteed.

We propose a new approach to Haskell's deriving mechanism, which allows users
to specify how to derive arbitrary class instances using standard
datatype-generic programming techniques. Generic functions, including the
methods from six standard Haskell 98 derivable classes, can be specified
entirely within Haskell 98 plus multi-parameter type classes, making them
lightweight and portable. We can also express Functor, Typeable, and many
other derivable classes with our technique. We implemented our deriving
mechanism together with many new derivable classes in the Utrecht Haskell
Compiler.