It is possible to convert a string to a TextEncoding using
mkTextEncoding :: String -> IO TextEncoding
Is there any way to do do the reverse? Or, given a TextEncoding, any way to find out any information about that encoding? There doesn't even seem to be an Eq instance for TextEncoding to allow comparing against the defined encodings in System.IO.
Am I missing something, or is there a technical reason why this should not be possible?
TextEncoding will be a member of the Show class in GHC 7.0.1. See ticket #4273.
Related
is there a function like "read" but for Text instead of String?
read :: Read a => Text -> a
i have already looked up in the documentation and it is not there
We can use Hoogle to check for that exact type signature.
It's not in base. There's a version of read like the one you want provided by the basic-prelude alternative prelude. But, if you understandably aren't ready to take the leap on alternative preludes, the definition is pretty simple.
import qualified Data.Text as Text
tread :: Read a => Text.Text -> a
tread = read . Text.unpack
today on "adventures in functional programming with lenses" our hero attempts to define a prism over a list element that may or may not exist.
It's a bit tricky to explain, so to avoid the X, Y problem I'll give the actual use-case in all its glory.
I'm writing a Text editor in Haskell called Rasa, the whole idea is that it's extremely extensible, and that means most functionality is written as extensions. Since it's a core principle, extensions ALSO depend on other extensions, so I needed a way to store their state centrally such that all extensions depending on an extension could access its current 'extension state'. Of course the types of these states is not known to the core of the editor, so at the moment I'm storing a list of Dynamic values. When the extension stores the state it converts to a Dynamic, then it can be extracted later via a prism like so:
data Store = Store
{ _event :: [Event]
, _editor :: E.Editor
, _extState :: [Dynamic]
}
ext :: Typeable a => Traversal' Store a
ext = extState.traverse._Dynamic
So now ext is a polymorphic Traversal that essentially operates over only the Dynamics that 'match' the type in question (if you set to it it'll replace values of the same type, if you 'get' from it, it acts as a traversal over the Dynamics that match the type of the outbound value). If that seems like magic, it basically is...
BTW, I'd love to have exactly 1 copy of a given Extension's state object in the list at any time.
So getting and setting is actually working fine IFF there's already a value of the proper type in the list, my question is how can I make a version of this Traversal such that if a value of the proper type is in the list that it will replace it (and getting works as expected), but that will ADD a value to the list if the traversal is SET to and there's NO matching element in the list. I understand that Traversal's aren't supposed to change the number of elements that they're traversing, so perhaps this needs to be a prism or lens over the list itself?
I understand this is really confusing, so please ask clarifying questions :)
As for things I've taken a look at already, I was looking at prefixed and _Cons as possible ways to do this, but I'm just not quite sure how to wire it up. Maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree entirely.
I could perhaps add a default value to the end of the traversal somehow, but I don't want to require Monoid or Default so I can't conjure up elements from nowhere (and I only want to do it when SETTING).
I'm also open to discussions about whether this is actually the proper way to store this state at all, but it's the most elegant of solutions I've found so far (though I know typecasting at run time is sub-optimal). I've looked into the Vault type, but passing keys around didn't really work well when I tried it (and I imagine it has similar type-casting performance issues).
Cheers! Thanks for reading.
I think the list of extensions is not proper solution for you. I would be added something like _extState :: Map TypeRep Ext where data Ext = forall a. Ext a. Then I would be added the lens:
ext :: forall a . Typeable a => Lens' Store (Maybe a)
ext = _extState . at (typeRep (Proxy :: Proxy a)) . mapping coerce
where
coerce = iso (\(Ext x) -> unsafeCoerce x) Ext
This lens does like at. So you can simply get/set your extensions.
But there is one limitation, all extensions must be of different types.
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? :-(
I have just started learning Haskell using "Learn you a Haskell for Great Good".
I am currently reading "Types and Typeclasses" chapter, so my knowledge is pretty .. non-existent.
I am using Sublime Text 2 with SublimeHaskell package which builds/checks file on every save.
The problem: I'm trying to make function type declaration like this:
funcName :: [Char] -> [Char]
I'm getting this warning:
Warning: Use String
Found:
[Char] -> [Char]
Why not:
String -> String
Build FAILED
Can you explain to me why is it a bad idea to use Char array instead of String or give me a link to an explanation of possible repercussions etc. I've googled and found nothing.
P.S. I'm a C# developer, I understand the difference between char array and strings in c-like languages.
Somewhere in the base library you will find this definition:
type String = [Char]
which says that String and [Char] are exactly the same thing. Which of the two you choose is a documentation choice. I often define type aliases like this:
type Domain = ByteString
type UserName = Text
It's a good idea to use types for documentation.
Also as an important side note, [Char] is not the type for character arrays, but character lists. Since there are also actual array types, the distinction is important!
String is nothing more than a type alias for [Char], so there is no practical between the two - it's simply a matter of readability.
You seem to be running HLint on your code automatically, and treating any HLint warnings as fatal errors. As the HLint author says "Do not blindly apply the output of HLint". String and [Char] are exactly the same, as everyone says, it's a question of which looks nicer. I would tend to use String if I'm operating on contiguous lists of characters I want to treat as a block (most of the time), and explicitly use [Char] when the characters don't make sense combined in a run (far rarer). HLint divides all hints into error (fix) and warning (think), so perhaps it might be best only to build fail on error hints.
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.