We represent the target language itself as an ideal monad supplied by the user, and provide a Scope monad transformer for introducing bound variables in user supplied terms. Users supply a Monad and Traversable instance, and we traverse to find free variables, and use the Monad to perform substitution that avoids bound variables. Slides describing and motivating this approach to name binding are available online at: http://www.slideshare.net/ekmett/bound-making-de-bruijn-succ-less The goal of this package is to make it as easy as possible to deal with name binding without forcing an awkward monadic style on the user. With generalized de Bruijn term you can lift whole trees instead of just applying succ to individual variables, weakening the all variables bound by a scope and greatly speeding up instantiation. By giving binders more structure we permit easy simultaneous substitution and further speed up instantiation.


Keywords
compilers-interpreters, language, library, Propose Tags, http://www.slideshare.net/ekmett/bound-making-de-bruijn-succ-less, Skip to Readme, Index, Quick Jump, Bound, Bound.Class, Bound.Name, Bound.Scope, Bound.Scope.Simple, Bound.TH, Bound.Term, Bound.Var, More info, bound-2.0.7.tar.gz, browse, Package description, Package maintainers, EdwardKmett, EricMertens, ryanglscott, edit package information , the documentation, examples/ folder
License
BSD-3-Clause
Install
cabal install bound-2.0.7

Documentation

Bound

Hackage Build Status

Goals

This library provides convenient combinators for working with "locally-nameless" terms. These can be useful when writing a type checker, evaluator, parser, or pretty printer for terms that contain binders like forall or lambda, as they ease the task of avoiding variable capture and testing for alpha-equivalence.

See the documentation on hackage for more information, but here is an example:

{-# LANGUAGE DeriveFunctor #-}
{-# LANGUAGE DeriveFoldable #-}
{-# LANGUAGE DeriveTraversable #-}
{-# LANGUAGE TemplateHaskell #-}

import Bound
import Control.Applicative
import Control.Monad
import Data.Functor.Classes
import Data.Foldable
import Data.Traversable
import Data.Eq.Deriving (deriveEq1)      -- these two are from the
import Text.Show.Deriving (deriveShow1)  -- deriving-compat package

infixl 9 :@
data Exp a = V a | Exp a :@ Exp a | Lam (Scope () Exp a)
  deriving (Eq,Show,Functor,Foldable,Traversable)

instance Applicative Exp where pure = V; (<*>) = ap

instance Monad Exp where
  return = V
  V a      >>= f = f a
  (x :@ y) >>= f = (x >>= f) :@ (y >>= f)
  Lam e    >>= f = Lam (e >>>= f)

lam :: Eq a => a -> Exp a -> Exp a
lam v b = Lam (abstract1 v b)

whnf :: Exp a -> Exp a
whnf (f :@ a) = case whnf f of
  Lam b -> whnf (instantiate1 a b)
  f'    -> f' :@ a
whnf e = e

deriveEq1 ''Exp
deriveShow1 ''Exp

main :: IO ()
main = do
  let term = lam 'x' (V 'x') :@ V 'y'
  print term         -- Lam (Scope (V (B ()))) :@ V 'y'
  print $ whnf term  -- V 'y'

There are longer examples in the examples/ folder.

Contact Information

Contributions and bug reports are welcome!

Please feel free to contact me through github or on the #haskell IRC channel on irc.freenode.net.

-Edward Kmett