Tuesday 6 July 2010

Generalised Algebraic Data Types in Haskell

I will just ignore the fact that I haven't posted anything here in more than 1.5 years. It's still my blog :-) Maybe there's gonna be a follow-up on how/what I was doing, but right now, I'll skip right over it.

Heinrich Apfelmus has posted an absolutely enlightening video explanation of Haskell's generalised algebraic data type system on his blog. It gives a newcomer quite a nice perspective on why GADTs are so powerful, and how one can use them. There's a couple of caveats: first, if you're totally new to Haskell this won't make too much sense to you. You'll have to understand at least data type declarations, type constructors and maybe the infix function notation (and the fact that every type constructor is a function!)

The example he chose (algebraic expressions) is quite nice & simple, but it's also a toy example. It would be nice to see GADTs used in an example that is still intuitive but maybe a little more... engaging. I'm thinking of 2-sorted Typed logic, and/or typed lambda-calculus with embedded FOPL. I'm currently implementing something along those lines and hope to release the code soon :-)

EDIT: I just discovered a newer post of his about the fixed point combinator; and it even taught me some new and interesting things! I really like the style of his videos... and his cute accent ^^.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Sweet. Bring it back. I was pretty excited to see this in my reader this morning.

adimit said...

Ha, thanks! I didn't even know I still had readers :-)

ke said...

You sure do. More! :D