Jeremy Gibbons

Johan Jeuring

Ralf Hinze

Roland Backhouse

This tutorial book presents six carefully revised lectures given at the Spring School on Datatype-Generic Programming, SSDGP 2006. This was held in Nottingham, UK, in April 2006. It was colocated with the Symposium on Trends in Functional Programming (TFP 2006), and the Conference of the Types Project (TYPES 2006). All the lectures have been subjected to thorough internal review by the editors and contributors, supported by independent external reviews.

International Spring School, SSDGP 2006, Nottingham, UK, April 24-27, 2006, Revised Lectures

Datatype-Generic Programming

This book contains the selected peer-reviewed and revised papers from the 24th International Symposium on Implementation and Application of Functional Languages, IFL 2012, held in Oxford, UK, in August/September 2012. The 14 papers included in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 28 revised submissions received from originally 37 presentations at the conference. The papers relate to the implementation and application of functional languages and function-based programming.

24th International Symposium, IFL 2012, Oxford, UK, August 30 - September 1, 2012, Revised Selected Papers

Implementation and Application of Functional Languages

A leitmotif in the evolution of programming paradigms has been the level and extent of parametrisation that is facilitated — the so-called genericity of the paradigm. The sorts of parameters that can be envisaged in a programming language range from simple values, like integers and ?oating-point numbers, through structured values, types and classes, to kinds (the type of types and/or classes).Datatype-generic programming is about parametrising programsby the structure of the data that they manipulate. Toappreciatethe importanceofdatatypegenericity,oneneedlooknofurther than the internet. The internet is a massive repository of structured data, but the structure is rarely exploited. For example, compression of data can be much more e?ective if its structure is known, but most compression algorithms regard the input data as simply a string of bits, and take no account of its internal organisation. Datatype-genericprogrammingisaboutexploitingthestructureofdatawhen it is relevant and ignoring it when it is not. Programming languages most c- monly used at the present time do not provide e?ective mechanisms for do- menting and implementing datatype genericity. This volume is a contribution towards improving the state of the art. The emergence of datatype genericity can be traced back to the late 1980s.

Ralf Hinze

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