Typed Combinators for Generic Traversal

Authors

Ralf Lämmel and Joost Visser

Abstract

Lacking support for generic traversal, functional programming languages suffer from a scalability problem when applied to large-scale program transformation problems. As a solution, we introduce functional strategies: typeful generic functions that not only can be applied to terms of any type, but which also allow generic traversal into subterms. We show how strategies are modelled inside a functional language, and we present a combinator library including generic traversal combinators. We illustrate our technique of programming with functional strategies by an implementation of the extract method refactoring for Java.

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• PADL 2002 Final paper Ps, Pdf
• CWI Technical Report Ps, Pdf

@inproceedings{LV02-PADL,
 author      = "R.~L{\"a}mmel and J.~Visser",
 title       = "{Typed Combinators for Generic Traversal}",
 booktitle   = "{Proc.\ Practical Aspects of Declarative Programming PADL 2002}",
 publisher   = "Springer-Verlag",
 series      = "LNCS",
 volume      = "2257",
 year        = "2002",
 month       = jan,
 pages       = "137--154"
}

@techreport{LV01-CWI,
 author      = "R.~L{\"a}mmel and J.~Visser",
 title       = "{Typed Combinators for Generic Traversal}",
 institution = "Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica",
 number      = "SEN-R0124",
 year        = "2001",
 month       = aug,
 note        = {34 pages},
}