What am I trying to do ?
Print under ghci the association list of formats and writers.
See doc :
writers :: [(String, Writer)]
Association list of formats and writers.
What has been tried
zurgl>>>import Text.Pandoc as P
zurgl>>>P.writers
<interactive>:20:1:
No instance for (Show (WriterOptions -> Pandoc -> [Char]))
arising from a use of `print'
Possible fix:
add an instance declaration for
(Show (WriterOptions -> Pandoc -> [Char]))
In a stmt of an interactive GHCi command: print it
I expected the corresponding show instance to be imported automatically, but it seems that's not the case. And I must admit I don't have any clue how to define an instance declaration for (Show (WriterOptions -> Pandoc -> [Char]). As a workaround, I've tried to import additional module of the Pandoc library, but still no Show instance available.
Then Should I define this instance by myself ?
If yes, have you any tips to share with me to complete this task.
If I shouldn't what's the issue ?
Thanks in advance for your help.
EDIT
Ok, I guess I saw my missunderstanding :
Doing :
zurgl>>>map (\x-> fst x) P.writers
["native","json","html","html5","html+lhs","html5+lhs","s5","slidy","slideous","dzslides","docbook","opendocument","latex","latex+lhs","beamer","beamer+lhs","context","texinfo","man","markdown","markdown+lhs","plain","rst","rst+lhs","mediawiki","textile","rtf","org","asciidoc"]
I think it make no sens to try to Show the second stuff in my tuples. It souhld be something like a function then we can't show it.
I guess it should be the problem.
What I tried to do make no sense as the tuple contain two different type.
The first one being an identifier (of type string) for a specific writer, the second one being the writer itself (then a function). For sure, if I try to print all of them it will fail as there is no Show instance for function.
Then to retrieve the list of available writer in Pandoc (with the aims to call the corresponding function dynamically), we just have to retrieve the list of identifier, as :
zurgl>>>map fst P.writers
["native","json","html","html5","html+lhs","html5+lhs","s5","slidy","slideous","dzslides","docbook","opendocument","latex","latex+lhs","beamer","beamer+lhs","context","texinfo","man","markdown","markdown+lhs","plain","rst","rst+lhs","mediawiki","textile","rtf","org","asciidoc"]
Related
I noticed that a function I wrote is now not working, despite using it successfully on other occasions.
My test file (made one just to test this issue) looks like this:
import System.Random
generator = next . snd
This results in the error
No instance for (RandomGen g0) arising from a use of ‘next’
The type variable ‘g0’ is ambiguous
Relevant bindings include
generator :: (a, g0) -> (Int, g0) (bound at Test.hs:2:1)
Note: there is a potential instance available:
instance RandomGen StdGen -- Defined in ‘System.Random’
In the first argument of ‘(.)’, namely ‘next’
In the expression: next . snd
In an equation for ‘generator’: generator = next . snd
The weird thing is that if I open ghci and type:
import System.Random
let generator = next . snd
Everything works just fine. What exactly am I missing?
Edit: Also tried this and it works just fine:
generator something = next (snd something)
this is because of the Monomorphism Restriction
It's a technical issue (please explore the link if you are interested in the details) and normally you'll never see because you add signatures or write down the arguments (not point-free style) in your modules - and in GHCi it's disabled - you got a bit unlucky here.
for newer versions of GHC this is enabled by default for compiled modules but disabled for GHCi (so it will use defaults as epsilonhalbe told you)
To get the same behavior you can run
:set -XMonomorphismRestriction
in GHCi
I think you need to add a type signature, ghci is using defaults therefore this does not happen there
I have this problem:
Couldn't match expected type ‘case-insensitive-1.2.0.5:Data.CaseInsensitive.Internal.CI
Text’
with actual type ‘Text’
In the first argument of ‘named’, namely ‘n’
because:
Prelude Text.XML.Lens> :t named
named
:: Applicative f =>
case-insensitive-1.2.0.5:Data.CaseInsensitive.Internal.CI
Data.Text.Internal.Text
-> (Element -> f Element) -> Element -> f Element
My code imports Data.Text and relies on OverloadedStrings. What steps should I take to resolve issues like this? What are short term and long term fixes?
Thanks to commenters as I was able to find out why I'm having this problem.
Short Answer: Pay close attention to types and make sure you understand them (read documentation of any module you see in error message).
Long Answer:
Notice that the type contains spaces and GHC may break them down to multiple lines. CI.Text is means something different than CI Text.
‘case-insensitive-1.2.0.5:Data.CaseInsensitive.Internal.CI
Text’
Text here is not a type synonym of re-exported internal Text (common practice in libraries). CI is a type constructor and you cannot import it (for a reason - you have to stop and read documentation of anything you touch). You will understand why you can import CI type and smart-constructors like mk instead.
I have many files that must be processed automatically. Each file holds the response of one student to an exercise which asks the student to give definitions for some functions given a type for each function.
My idea is to have an Haskell script that loads each student file, and verifies if each function has the expected type.
A constraint is that the student files are not defined as modules.
How can I do this?
My best alternative so far is to spawn a GHCi process that will read stdin from a "test file" with GHCi commands, for example:
:load student1.hs
:t g
... and so on ...
then parse the returned output from GHCi to find the types of the functions in the student file.
Is there another clean way to load an arbitrary Haskell file and introspect its code?
Thanks
Haskell does not save type information at runtime. In Haskell, types are used for pre-runtime type checking at the static analysis phase and are later erased. You can read more about Haskell's type system here.
Is there a reason you want to know the type of a function at runtime? maybe we can help with the problem itself :)
Edit based on your 2nd edit:
I don't have a good solution for you, but here is one idea that might work:
Run a script that for each student module will:
Take the name of the module and produce a file Test.hs:
module Test where
import [module-name]
test :: a -> b -> [(b,a)]
test = g
run ghc -fno-code Test.hs
check the output does not contain type errors
write results into a log file
I think if you have a dynamically determined number of .hs files, which you need to load, parse and introspect, you could/should use the GHC API instead.
See for example:
Using GHC API to compile Haskell sources to CORE and CORE to binary
https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2009-April/060705.html
These might not be something you can use directly — and I haven't done anything like this myself so far either — but these should get you started.
See also:
https://wiki.haskell.org/GHC/As_a_library
https://hackage.haskell.org/package/hint
The closest Haskell feature to that is Data.Typeable.typeOf. Here's a GHCi session:
> import Data.Typeable
> typeOf (undefined :: Int -> Char)
Int -> Char
> typeOf (undefined :: Int -> [Char])
Int -> [Char]
> typeOf (undefined :: Int -> Maybe [Char])
Int -> Maybe [Char]
> :t typeOf
typeOf :: Typeable a => a -> TypeRep
Under the hood, the Typeable a constraint forces Haskell to retain some type tags until runtime, so that they can be retrieved by typeOf. Normally, no such tags exist at runtime. The TypeRep type above is the type for such tags.
That being said, having such information is almost never needed in Haskell. If you are using typeOf to implement something, you are likely doing it wrong.
If you are using that to defer type checks to run time, when they could have been performed at compile time, e.g. using a Dynamic-like type for everything, then you are definitely doing it wrong.
If the function is supposed to be exported with a specific name, I think probably the easiest way would be to just write a test script that calls the functions and checks they return the right results. If the test script doesn't compile, the student's submission is incorrect.
The alternative is to use either the GHC API (kinda hard), or play with Template Haskell (simpler, but still not that simple).
Yet another possibility is to load the student's code into GHCi and use the :browse command to dump out everything that's exported. You can then grep for the term you're interested in. That should be quite easy to automate.
There's a catch, however: foo :: x -> x and foo :: a -> a are the same type, even though textually they don't match at all. You might contemplate trying to normalise the variable names, but it's worse: foo :: Int -> Int and foo :: Num x => x -> x don't look remotely the same, yet one type is an instance of the other.
...which I guess means I'm saying that my answer is bad? :-(
This is something of an extension to this question:
Dispatching to correct function with command line arguments in Haskell
So, as it turns out, I don't have a good solution yet for dispatching "commands" from the command line to other functions. So, I'd like to extend the approach in the question above. It seems cumbersome to have to manually add functions to the table and apply the appropriate transformation function to each function so that it takes a list of the correct size instead of its normal arguments. Instead, I'd like to build a table where I'll add functions and "tag" them with the number of arguments it needs to take from the command line. The "add" procedure, should then take care of composing with the correct "takesXarguments" procedure and adding it to the table.
I'd like to be able to install "packages" of functions into the table, which makes me think I need to be able to keep track of the state of the table, since it will change when packages get installed. Is the Reader Monad or the State Monad what I'm looking for?
No monad necessary. Your tagging idea is on the right track, but that information is encoded probably in a different way than you expected.
I would start with a definition of a command:
type Command = [String] -> IO ()
Then you can make "command maker" functions:
mkCommand1 :: (String -> IO ()) -> Command
mkCommand2 :: (String -> String -> IO ()) -> Command
...
Which serves as the tag. If you don't like the proliferation of functions, you can also make a "command lambda":
arg :: (String -> Command) -> Command
arg f (x:xs) = f x xs
arg f [] = fail "Wrong number of arguments"
So that you can write commands like:
printHelloName :: Command
printHelloName = arg $ \first -> arg $ \last -> do
putStrLn $ "Hello, Mr(s). " ++ last
putStrLn $ "May I call you " ++ first ++ "?"
Of course mkCommand1 etc. can be easily written in terms of arg, for the best of both worlds.
As for packages, Command sufficiently encapsulates choices between multiple subcommands, but they don't compose. One option here is to change Command to:
type Command = [String] -> Maybe (IO ())
Which allows you to compose multiple Commands into a single one by taking the first action that does not return Nothing. Now your packages are just values of type Command as well. (In general with Haskell we are very interested in these compositions -- rather than packages and lists, think about how you can take two of some object to make a composite object)
To save you from the desire you have surely built up: (1) there is no reasonable way to detect the number of arguments a function takes*, and (2) there is no way to make a type depend on a number, so you won't be able to create a mkCommand which takes as its first argument an Int for the number of arguments.
Hope this helped.
In this case, it turns out that there is, but I recommend against it and think it is a bad habit -- when things get more abstract the technique breaks down. But I'm something of a purist; the more duct-tapey Haskellers might disagree with me.
I'm trying different data structures for implementing Prim's algorithm. So I made a class to abstract what I want to do:
class VertexContainer a where
contains :: a -> Vertex -> Bool
insert :: a -> WeightedEdge -> a
numVertices :: a -> Int
Now I want to use a heap (from Data.Heap) as my vertex container. But I can't for the life of me figure out the syntax. As you can see from the insert declaration, the container can only hold WeightedEdges, which are a data type. So I tried:
instance VertexContainer (Heap MinPolicy WeightedEdge) where
contains _ _ = True
It tells me it's an illegal type synonym. I've tried various other permutations, and none of them seem to work. Can anyone help me?
If you read the entire error message you'll find that it tells you how to be able to use a type synonym in an instance declaration, namely by using the language extension TypeSynonymInstances. E.g., you can pass -XTypeSynonymInstances on the command line.
I got it working by wrapping this into a newtype. Considered ugly. I guess you have to wait for one of the Haskell gurus to answer this.