1.0.0 Changes

Version 1.0.0 is the first official release, and is not compatible with 0.9.0 and earlier development versions.

The targeted GHC version is 7.10; 8.0 support is postponed due to its non–backward compatible revisions to Template Haskell.

• Module restructuring

  The module structure is refined and simplified, with Generics.BiGUL.AST changed to Generics.BiGUL, pattern matching functions extracted to Generics.BiGUL.PatternMatching, and Generics.BiGUL.Lib created to serve as a prelude. More specific library modules are placed under Generics.BiGUL.Lib.:

  • Generics.BiGUL.Lib.List is the place for list-processing library programs. For now the only inhabitant is the “BiFluX alignment”.

  • Generics.BiGUL.Lib.HuStudies contains some small, concrete examples illustrating the use of every BiGUL construct.

• Generics.BiGUL.Skip and Generics.BiGUL.Dep changed

  • The view type of Skip is not restricted to () anymore, but when skipping, the view should be determined by the source as specified by the new functional argument to Skip — we can perform Skip f on a source s if and only if the view is f s. The old Skip can be defined in terms of the new one as Skip (const ()). There is a helper function skip = Skip . const defined in Generics.BiGUL.Lib.

  • Dep has been reverted to the original version, used to ignore the second component of the view when it depends on the first (but not the source).

• Major changes to Generics.BiGUL.TH

  • deriveBiGULGeneric now supports newtype.

  • The update syntax now takes the source pattern as its first argument and the view pattern as its second argument. (Previously the view pattern comes first.)

  • rearrV and update now check at compile time whether all view information is used (forbidding wildcard in view patterns and requiring all view variables are used); also rearrS and rearrV check whether their first argument is a one-argument lambda-expression.

  • The branch construction syntax has been slimmed down to just four functions: normal, normalSV, adaptive, and adaptiveSV.

  • Normal branch constructing functions now take an additional argument specifying on the source an “exit condition”, which should be satisfied by the updated source after the branch body is executed. All the exit conditions in a Case statement should (ideally) be disjoint. Overlapping exit conditions are still allowed for fast prototyping, though — the putback semantics of 'Case' will compute successfully as long as the ranges of the branches are disjoint (regardless of whether the exit conditions are specified precisely enough).

• Error-reporting mechanism overhauled

  • The types of put and get from Generics.BiGUL.Interpreter are changed to produce simply Maybe results. When execution fails (producing Nothing), invoke putTrace and getTrace to see the exact failure and the execution trace leading to the failure.

  • The execution traces include intermediate sources and views; the types used in a BiGUL program are thus required to be instances of Show.

• Show instances for BiGUL programs removed

  There are two reasons: Functions, which are everywhere in BiGUL programs, cannot be shown; and worse, printing of recursive BiGUL programs will not terminate.