Hi!
This technique has been used to define netlists in hardware description
languages. The original Lava [1] used a monad, but later switched to
using observable sharing [2]. Wired [3] uses a monad similar to yours
(but more complicated).
I think it would be nice to have a single library for defining such
graphs (or maybe there is one already?). The graph structure in Wired
could probably be divided into a purely structural part and a
hardware-specific part.
[1] http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.46.5221
[2] http://www.cs.chalmers.se/~dave/papers/observable-sharing.pdf
[3] http://hackage.haskell.org/package/Wired
/ Emil
Soenke Hahn skrev:
Hi!
Some time ago, i needed to write down graphs in Haskell. I wanted to be able
to write them down without to much noise, to make them easily maintainable. I
came up with a way to define graphs using monads and the do notation. I thought
this might be interesting to someone, so i wrote a small script to illustrate
the idea. Here's an example:
example :: Graph String
example = buildGraph $ do
a <- mkNode "A" []
b <- mkNode "B" [a]
mkNode "C" [a, b]
In this graph there are three nodes identified by ["A", "B", "C"] and three
edges ([("A", "B"), ("A", "C"), ("B", "C")]). Think of the variables a and b
as outputs of the nodes "A" and "B". Note that each node identifier needs to be
mentioned only once. Also the definition of edges (references to other nodes
via the outputs) can be checked at compile time.
The attachment is a little script that defines a Graph-type (nothing
elaborate), the "buildGraph" function and an example graph that is a little
more complex than the above. The main function of the script prints the
example graph to stdout to be read by dot (or similar).
By the way, it is possible to define cyclic graphs using mdo (RecursiveDo).
I haven't come across something similar, so i thought, i'd share it. What do
you think?
Sönke
_______________________________________________
Haskell-Cafe mailing list
[email protected]
http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
