Relating Syntactic and CompData

Update: toAST/fromAST have been rewritten using catamorphisms.

Syntactic and CompData are two packages for modeling compositional data types. Both packages use the technique from Data Types à la Carte to model polymorphic variants, but they model recursion quite differently: Syntactic uses an application tree, while CompData uses a type-level fixed-point.

This post demonstrates the relation between the two approaches by showing how to translate one to the other. As a side effect, I also show how to obtain pattern functors for free, avoiding the need to derive instances for various type classes in CompData.

To remain focused on the matter at hand, I will only introduce Syntactic briefly. For more information, see this paper. I will also assume some familiarity with CompData.

Preliminaries

We start by importing the necessary stuff from Syntactic:

import Language.Syntactic
    ( AST (..)
    , Full
    , (:->)
    , DenResult
    , Args (..)
    , mapArgs
    , appArgs
    , fold
    )

Data types in Syntactic correspond to Generalised Compositional Data Types in CompData. These are found under Data.Comp.Multi in the module hierarchy:

import Data.Comp.Multi
    ( Cxt (Term)
    , Term
    , HFunctor (..)
    , cata
    )

import Data.Comp.Multi.HFoldable (HFoldable (..))

Cxt is the type-level fixed-point operator, which I will use by its alias Term. The type classes HFunctor and HFoldable are used for traversing terms.

Our example will also make use of the Monoid class.

import Data.Monoid

Syntactic

The idea behind Syntactic is to model a GADT such as the following

data Expr a
  where
    Int :: Int -> Expr Int
    Add :: Expr Int -> Expr Int -> Expr Int

as a simpler non-recursive data type:

data ExprSym a
  where
    IntSym :: Int -> ExprSym (Full Int)
    AddSym :: ExprSym (Int :-> Int :-> Full Int)

If we think of Expr as an AST, then ExprSym defines the symbols in this tree, but not the tree itself. The type parameter of each symbol is called the symbol signature. The signature for Add – (Int :-> Int :-> Full Int) – should be read as saying that Add expects two integer sub-expressions and produces an integer result. In general, an ordinary constructor of the type

C :: T a -> T b -> ... -> T x

is modeled as a symbol of the type

CSym :: TSym (a :-> b :-> ... :-> Full x)

The AST type can be used to make an actual AST from the symbols:

type Expr' a = AST ExprSym (Full a)

This type is isomorphic to Expr. So, in what way is Expr' better than Expr? The answer is that Expr' can be traversed generically by matching only on the constructors of AST. For example, to compute the size of an AST, we only need two cases:

size :: AST sym sig -> Int
size (Sym _)  = 1
size (s :$ a) = size s + size a

The first case says that a symbol has size 1, and the second says how to join the sizes of a symbol and a sub-expression. (Note that s can contain nested uses of (:$).) Another advantage of using AST is that it supports composable data types.

Listing arguments

The size function is a bit special in that it operates on every symbol application in a compositional way. For more complex generic traversals, it is often needed to operate on a symbol and all its arguments at once. For example, Syntactic provides the following function for folding an AST:

fold :: (forall sig . sym sig -> Args c sig -> c (Full (DenResult sig)))
     -> AST sym (Full a)
     -> c (Full a)

The caller provides a function that, given a symbol and a list of results for its sub-expressions, produces a result for the combined expression. fold uses this function to compute a result for the whole AST. The type of fold requires some explanation. The c type (the folded result) is indexed by the type of the corresponding sub-expression; i.e. folding a sub-expression of type AST sym (Full a) results in a value type c (Full a). The type function DenResult gives the result type of a symbol signature; e.g. DenResult (Int :-> Full Bool) = Bool.

For our current purposes, the most important part of the type is the argument list. Args c sig is a list of results, each one corresponding to an argument in the signature sig (again, more information is found in the Syntactic paper). Args is defined so as to ensure that the length of the list is the same as the number of arguments in the signature. For example, Args c (Int :-> Int :-> Full Int) is a list of two elements, each one of type c (Full Int).

Pattern functors for free

Now to the gist of this post. Using Args, we can easily define a pattern functor (actually a higher-order functor) corresponding to a symbol:

data PF sym f a
  where
    PF :: sym sig -> Args f sig -> PF sym f (Full (DenResult sig))

A pattern functor here is simply a symbol paired with an argument list. Each argument is of type f (Full b), where b is the type of the corresponding sub-expression. The HFunctor instance is straightforward (mapArgs is provided by Syntactic):

instance HFunctor (PF sym)
  where
    hfmap f (PF s as) = PF s (mapArgs f as)

Now we can actually use the symbols defined earlier to make an expression type using CompData’s fixed-point operator:

type Expr'' = Term (PF ExprSym)

The correspondence between expressions based on AST and expressions based on Term can be seen by the following functions mapping back and forth between them (appArgs is provided by Syntactic):¹

toAST :: Term (PF sym) (Full a) -> AST sym (Full a)
toAST = cata (\(PF s as) -> appArgs (Sym s) as)

fromAST :: AST sym (Full a) -> Term (PF sym) (Full a)
fromAST = fold (\s as -> Term (PF s as))

The translations are simply defined using catamorphisms; cata for CompData terms and fold for Syntactic terms.

To make the experiment a bit more complete, we also give an instance of HFoldable. For this, we need a helper function which is currently not included in Syntactic:

foldrArgs
    :: (forall a . c (Full a) -> b -> b)
    -> b
    -> (forall sig . Args c sig -> b)
foldrArgs f b Nil       = b
foldrArgs f b (a :* as) = f a (foldrArgs f b as)

After this, the instance follows naturally:

instance HFoldable (PF sym)
  where
    hfoldr f b (PF s as) = foldrArgs f b as

Testing

To try out the code, we define a small expression using the Expr' representation:

expr1 :: Expr' Int
expr1 = int 2 <+> int 3 <+> int 4

int :: Int -> Expr' Int
int i = Sym (IntSym i)

(<+>) :: Expr' Int -> Expr' Int -> Expr' Int
a <+> b = Sym AddSym :$ a :$ b

Next, we define the size function for expressions based on CompData’s Term (Sum is provided by Data.Monoid):

size' :: HFoldable f => Term f a -> Sum Int
size' (Term f) = Sum 1 `mappend` hfoldMap size' f

And, finally, the test:

*Main> size expr1
5

*Main> size' $ fromAST expr1
Sum {getSum = 5}

Summary

Hopefully, this post has provided some insights into the relation between Syntactic and CompData. The key observation is that symbol types defined for Syntactic give rise to free pattern functors that can be used to define terms in CompData. As we can translate freely between the two representations, there doesn’t appear to be any fundamental differences between them. A practical difference is that CompData uses type classes like HFunctor and HFoldable for generic traversals, while syntactic provides more direct access to the tree structure. As an interesting aside, the free pattern functors defined in this post avoids the need to use TemplateHaskell to derive instances for higher-order functor type classes in CompData.

The code in this post is available has been tested with GHC 7.6.1, syntactic-1.5.1 and compdata-0.6.1.

Download the source code (literate Haskell).

---

1. As noted by Patrick Bahr, the toAST/fromAST translations destroy compositionality since a compound domain (S1 :+: S2) in Syntactic is mapped to a monolithic functor PF (S1 :+: S2) in CompData. However, with suitable type-level programming it should be possible to make the mapping to the compound type (PF S1 :+: PF S2) instead.↩