mmhelloworld

main = println "Hello World!"

Frege: Record Accessors and Mutators

Frege has built-in mechanism to access and mutate (non-destructive) record fields.

Consider the following type in Frege:

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frege> data Point = Point {x :: Int, y :: Int}
data type Point :: *

frege> derive Show Point
instance Show  Point

Now we can use the following functions to get and set record fields:

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frege> Point.x
:: Point -> Int

frege> Point.{x = }
:: Point -> Int -> Point

frege> Point.{x <- }
:: Point -> (Int->Int) -> Point

For Field x,

  1. The function Point.x is the getter.
  2. The function Point.{x = } is a setter which sets the field x with a new value.
  3. The function Point.{x <- } is also a setter but applies a function to update the current value.

We can use the functions like this:

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frege> p = Point 3 4
value p :: Point

frege> p
Point 3 4

frege> Point.x p
3

frege> Point.{x =} p 13
Point 13 4

frege> Point.{x <-} p (+15)
Point 18 4

Frege also provides some shortcuts to apply these functions:

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frege> p.x -- Same as `Point.x p`
3

frege> p.{x = 10} -- Same as `Point.{x = } p 10`
Point 10 4

frege> p.{x <-} -- Same as `Point.{x <-} p`
:: (Int->Int) -> Point

frege> p.{x <- (+10)} -- Same as `Point.{x <- } p (+10)`
Point 13 4

Multiple updates can be combined:

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frege> p.{x <- (+8), y = 20} -- Increment x by 8 and set y to 20
Point 11 20

Accessors and updates can be at any level deep. Let’s create another type:

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frege> :{
> data Circle = Circle {center :: Point, radius :: Int}
>
> derive Show Circle
> :}

data type Circle :: *
instance Show  Circle

frege>

Here we have an aggregate type Circle which composes another type Point for it’s field center. Now we can update and select fields at different levels:

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frege> c = Circle {center = Point 4 5, radius = 10}
value c :: Circle

frege> c
Circle (Point 4 5) 10

frege> c.center.x
4

frege> c.{center <- Point.{x = 8}}
Circle (Point 8 5) 10

frege> c.{center <- Point.{y <- (+20)}, radius <- (*5)}
Circle (Point 4 25) 50

In the latest version, Frege provides syntactic sugar for lambdas using underscores. For example, T.foo can be written as _.foo if the type can be deduced from the context the lambda is applied. Hence the following two are equivalent.

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frege> c.{center <- Point.{x = 25}}
Circle (Point 25 5) 10

frege> c.{center <- _.{x = 25}}
Circle (Point 25 5) 10

Frege provides another utility to check for a field’s existence. This would be useful if we have multiple constructors with different set of fields.

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frege> :{
> data Point = Point2d {x :: Int, y :: Int}
>            | Point3d {x :: Int, y :: Int, z :: Int}
>
> derive Show Point
> :}

data type Point :: *
instance Show  Point

frege>

In the above code, we have two constructors Point2d and Point3d where the field z exists only for Point3d. We can check for the existence of field z like this:

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frege> Point.{z?}
:: Point -> Bool

frege> hasZ = Point.{z?}

frege> hasZ $ Point3d 3 4 5
true

frege> hasZ $ Point2d 3 4
false

frege> p = Point3d 3 4 5
value p :: Point

frege> p.{z?}
true

For more details on how these field existence check, accessor and mutator functions are generated for a record type, here is the link to Frege language reference: http://www.frege-lang.org/doc/Language.pdf.

Happy coding!

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