Three Complementary Approaches to Bidirectional Programming

A bidirectional transformation is a pair of mappings between source and view data objects, one in each direction. When the view is modified, the source is updated accordingly with respect to some laws. One way to reduce the development and maintenance effort of bidirectional transformations is to have specialized languages in which the resulting programs are bidirectional by constructiongiving rise to the paradigm of bidirectional programming.In this paper, we develop a framework for applicative-style and higher-order bidirectional programming, in which we can write bidirectional transformations as unidirectional programs in standard functional languages, opening up access to the bundle of language features previously only available to conventional unidirectional languages. Our framework essentially bridges two very different approaches of bidirectional programming, namely the lens framework and Voigtländer's semantic bidirectionalization, creating a new programming style that is able to bag benefits from both.

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“…We can also match elements according to keys [2,11]. As an example, let us consider a variant of the map combinator.…”

Section: Lifting Lens-combinatorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Applicative bidirectional programming with lenses

Matsuda

Wang

2015

Proceedings of the 20th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming

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A bidirectional transformation is a pair of mappings between source and view data objects, one in each direction. When the view is modified, the source is updated accordingly with respect to some laws. One way to reduce the development and maintenance effort of bidirectional transformations is to have specialized languages in which the resulting programs are bidirectional by constructiongiving rise to the paradigm of bidirectional programming.In this paper, we develop a framework for applicative-style and higher-order bidirectional programming, in which we can write bidirectional transformations as unidirectional programs in standard functional languages, opening up access to the bundle of language features previously only available to conventional unidirectional languages. Our framework essentially bridges two very different approaches of bidirectional programming, namely the lens framework and Voigtländer's semantic bidirectionalization, creating a new programming style that is able to bag benefits from both.

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“…It is shown that the technique generalizes to arbitrary Traversable datatypes such as rose trees [10,19].…”

Section: Construction Of Backward Transformationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Actually, this generalization has already been done in the previous work [10,19], and we borrow the ideas and adapt them for our new setup. More concretely, we use the datatype-generic function traverse from Data.Traversable to define assignLocs and matchViews, and change the type declarations of fwd and bwd accordingly.…”

Section: Going Genericmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bidirectionalization for free with runtime recording

Matsuda

Wang

2013

Proceedings of the 15th Symposium on Principles and Practice of Declarative Programming

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A bidirectional transformation is a pair of mappings between source and view data objects, one in each direction. When the view is modified, the source is updated accordingly with respect to some laws. Over the years, a lot of effort has been made to offer better language support for programming such transformations. In particular, a technique known as bidirectionalization is able to analyze and transform unidirectional programs written in general purpose languages, and "bidirectionalize" them.Among others, a technique termed as semantic bidirectionalization proposed by Voigtländer stands out in term of user-friendliness. The unidirectional program can be written using arbitrary language constructs, as long as the function is polymorphic and the language constructs respect parametricity. The free theorems that follow from the polymorphic type of the program allow a kind of forensic examination of the transformation, determining its effect without examining its implementation. This is convenient, in the sense that the programmer is not restricted to using a particular syntax; but it does require the transformation to be polymorphic.In this paper, we lift this polymorphism requirement to improve the applicability of semantic bidirectionalization. Concretely, we provide a type class PackM γ α µ, which intuitively reads "a concrete datatype γ is abstracted to a type α, and the 'observations' made by a transformation on values of type γ are recorded by a monad µ". With PackM , we turn monomorphic transformations into polymorphic ones, that are ready to be bidirectionalized. We demonstrate our technique with a case study of standard XML queries, which were considered beyond semantic bidirectionalization because of their monomorphic nature.

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“…Actually, this generalization has already been done in the previous work [15,8]; we borrow the ideas and adapt them for our new setup. More concretely, we use the datatype-generic function traverse from Data.Traversable to define assignLocs and matchViews, and change the type declarations of fwd and bwd accordingly.…”

Section: Going Genericmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…And, even worse, it introduces a maintenance issue, because <bib> <book year="1994"> <title>TCP/IP Illustrated</title> <author>Stevens W.</author> <publisher>Addison-Wesley</publisher> <price>65.95</price> </book> <book year="1992"> <title>Advanced Programming in the Unix environment</title> <author>Stevens W.</author> <publisher>Addison-Wesley</publisher> <price>65.95</price> </book> <book year="2000"> <title>Data on the Web</title> <author>Abiteboul Serge</author> <author>Buneman Peter</author> <author>Suciu Dan</author> <publisher>Morgan Kaufmann Publishers</publisher> <price>39.95</price> </book> </bib> changes to one transformation entail matching changes to the other. Therefore, a lot of work has gone into ways to reduce this duplication and the problems it causes; in particular, there has been a recent rise in linguistic (mostly functional) approaches to streamlining bidirectional transformations [6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19]-this is very much a current problem.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“Bidirectionalization for free” for monomorphic transformations

Matsuda

Wang

2015

Science of Computer Programming

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A bidirectional transformation is a pair of mappings between source and view data objects, one in each direction. When the view is modified, the source is updated accordingly with respect to some laws. Over the years, a lot of effort has been made to offer better language support for programming such transformations. In particular, a technique known as bidirectionalization is able to analyze and transform unidirectional programs written in general purpose languages, and "bidirectionalize" them.Among others, an approach termed semantic bidirectionalization proposed by Voigtländer stands out in terms of user-friendliness. A unidirectional program can be written using arbitrary language constructs, as long as the function it represents is polymorphic and the language constructs respect parametricity. The free theorems that follow from the polymorphic type of the program allow a kind of forensic examination of the transformation, determining its effect without examining its implementation. This is convenient, as the programmer is not restricted to using a particular syntax; but it does require the transformation to be polymorphic.In this paper, we lift this polymorphism requirement to improve the applicability of semantic bidirectionalization. Concretely, we provide a type class PackM γ α µ, which intuitively reads "a concrete datatype γ is abstracted to a type α, and the 'observations' made by a transformation on values of type γ are recorded by a monad µ". With PackM , we turn monomorphic transformations into polymorphic ones that are ready to be bidirectionalized. We demonstrate our technique with case studies of typical applications of bidirectional transformation, namely text processing, XML query and graph transformation, which were commonly considered beyond semantic bidirectionalization because of their monomorphic nature.

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Three Complementary Approaches to Bidirectional Programming

Cited by 29 publications

References 46 publications

Applicative bidirectional programming with lenses

Applicative bidirectional programming with lenses

Bidirectionalization for free with runtime recording

“Bidirectionalization for free” for monomorphic transformations

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