purescript-labeled-data

Conversions of arbitrary data types to and from Records or Variants

• Imports
• ADTs: Sums and Products
• Records and Variants. A better alternative?
  • How could Builtin Variants look like?
• Using this library
  • Variants
  • Records

For the code samples in this file you need the following imports:

module Test.GenReadme where


import Data.Generic.Rep (class Generic)
import Data.Maybe (Maybe(..))
import Data.Tuple.Nested (type (/\))
import Data.Variant (Variant)
import LabeledData.RecordLike.Generic (genericToRecord)
import LabeledData.TransformEntry.Transforms (ArgsToRecord, LowerFirst, Prefix)
import LabeledData.VariantLike.Generic (genericToVariant)
import Type.Proxy (Proxy(..))

PureScript has Haskell-like algebraic data types (ADTs). They can be described as tagged union types with positional data fields.

The following ADT definition is indented in a way that highlights the two main properties of such a type.

data Foo
  -- Constructor    Arg 1                  Arg 2                  Arg 3
  = MakeA           Int                    String                 (Maybe Int)
  | MakeB           Boolean
  | MakeC
  | MakeD           { x :: Int, y :: Int }
  | MakeE           Char                   { x :: Int, y :: Int }

• On the vertical axis alternatives to construct a value of this type are listed. They're distinguished by the name of the constructor also known as it's label. This is an "OR" relation.
• On the horizontal axis describes the positional fields that each constructor can hold. This is an "AND" relation.

Those types are called algebraic because if you know the number of possible inhabitants of each field, you can calculate the number of inhabitants of an ADT by this formula: Make the product for each field per constructor and take the sum of the results.

PureScript provides very convenient ways to deal with ADTs. They can be constructed with their constructors:

foo1 :: Foo
foo1 = MakeA 3 "bla" (Just 1)

foo2 :: Foo
foo2 = MakeC

foo3 :: Foo
foo3 = MakeE 'a' { x: 3, y: 2 }

And they can be destructed by their constructors as well:

f :: Foo -> String
f foo = case foo of
  MakeA _ str _ -> str
  MakeB _       -> "B"
  MakeC         -> "C"
  MakeD _       -> "D"
  MakeE _ _     -> "E"

One downside of ADTs is that they can only be treated as a whole. The number of cases is fixed and the number of fields is also fixed. There is no way to compose them from smaller units. Nor can you narrow down a type to another type with less constructor cases. The same is true for the fields in each case. For the latter PureScript provides already a powerful alternative with great builtin support: Records.

The fields of the MakeA constructor could also be described as { foo :: Int, bar :: String, baz :: Maybe Int }

This is syntactic sugar for Record (foo :: Int, bar :: String, baz :: Maybe Int). PureScript provides a special kind called "Row" which can be regarded as a labeled collection of types. The Record type constructor takes a Row of types to create a record type. Values of this type must then provide all specified fields. Thus Records can be regarded as a product type with labeled fields. Records are very flexible because there is a lot of type level programming operating on Rows possible.

Unfortunately there is no builtin equivalent for Sum types. But fortunately PureScript is flexible enough that something like this can be provided as a library: purescript-variant If you're not familiar with Varaint it's recommended to go through the library's README.

Now we're able to redefine the above ADT as a Variant type:

type Vec = { x :: Int, y :: Int }

type FooV = Variant
  ( makeA :: Record ( _1 :: Int     , _2 :: String , _3 :: Maybe Int )
  , makeB :: Record ( _1 :: Boolean                                  )
  , makeC :: Record (                                                )
  , makeD :: Record ( _1 :: Vec                                      )
  , makeE :: Record ( _1 :: Char    , _2 :: Vec                      )
  )

The fields for each case are defined as records. To highlight the analogy the more verbose Record syntax is used. Variants are structurally equivalent to Records sharing the same type level advantages of Rows. The difference is just that the row fields are interpreted as cases.

So if Variants and Records are more powerful, why not using them as a replacement of ADTs? Theoretically it would be possible to avoid ADTs completely. With Variants wrapped in a newtype even recursive data structures like List are possible. The main problem why Variants are not as convenient is that they are not builtin into the language. Maybe not yet. This makes constructing and pattern matching look very noisy.

The following table contains a comparison of the existing way to deal with Variants and a proposal how it might look like if they were builtin to the language like Records are.

type MyVar = Variant
  ( a :: Int
  , b :: String
  , c :: Boolean
  )

type MyVar = 
  { a :: Int
  | b :: String
  | c :: Boolean
  }

myVar1 :: MyVar
myVar1 = V.inj (Proxy :: _ "a") 34

myVar1 :: MyVar
myVar1 = |a 34

toInt :: MyVar -> Int
toInt = V.case_ # V.onMatch
  { a: \_ -> 0
  , b: \_ -> 1
  }

toInt :: MyVar -> Int
toInt = case_ of
  a _ -> 0
  b _ -> 1

In any way, in the current state of the language for me ADTs are still the most concise way to describe data. So for good reasons you don't want to define your type as a Variant, however there may be places in your program where it would be quite convenient to convert your type to a Variant.

This library provides a way to generically convert ADTs into Variants:

data Bar 
  = Bar1 Int    String
  | Bar2 String

derive instance Generic Bar _

bar :: Bar
bar = Bar1 3 ""

barV :: Variant
  ( bar1 :: { _1 :: Int    , _2 :: String }
  , bar2 :: { _1 :: String                }
  )
barV = genericToVariant (Proxy :: _ (LowerFirst /\ ArgsToRecord (Prefix "_"))) bar

Single case ADTs can be turned into Records:

data Baz = Baz Int String

derive instance Generic Baz _

baz :: Baz
baz = Baz 3 ""

bazV :: 
  { _1 :: Int
  , _2 :: String
  }
bazV = genericToRecord (Proxy :: _ (Prefix "_")) baz