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Generic Views For Generic Types

Stc
Date: 2008-01-24

Time: 11:45

Room: BBL room 471

----+++ Speaker: Thomas van Noort

----+++ Title: Generic Views for Generic Types (Thesis Defense) ([[%ATTACHURL%/thesis-slides.pdf][slides]]/[[%ATTACHURL%/thesis.pdf][thesis]])

----+++ Abstract

Generic programming allows us to capture uniform behaviour for a family 
of types in a single definition. In this thesis, we focus on Generic 
Haskell, a preprocessor to Haskell which enables us to define generic 
functions and generic types. Such definitions are applicable in almost 
any context since their result depends on a structural representation of 
types. Several representations exist, which together are called generic 
views. These generic views include a standard view using sums of 
products, a balanced view to improve efficiency, and a fixed-point view 
that makes the recursive occurrences in a type explicit. In contrast to 
generic functions, Generic Haskell allows us define generic types only 
using the standard view.

This thesis studies to what extent generic views, other than the 
standard view, are useful on the type level. We illustrate the use of 
generic views for generic types by giving several examples, including a 
finite map library with improved efficiency, a generic rewriting library 
with automated extension of the object language with meta variables, and 
the zipper for efficient traversal of data structures, with improved 
usability.