lens over tea #3: folds

Okay, the exploration of lens continues. This post is a bit boring because folds are much less interesting than, say, prisms, but hey, I promised shorter posts.

Fold

A fold is to a getter what a traversal is to a lens:

type Lens s t a b = forall f . Functor f => ... s t a b type Traversal s t a b = forall f . Applicative f => ... s t a b type Getter s a = forall f . ( Contravariant f, Functor f) => ... s af,f) type Fold s a = forall f . ( Contravariant f, Applicative f) => ... s af,f)

(Isn’t it cool how each combination of constraints gives us a different useful type?)

So, as you may expect, a fold is simply a getter that can return multiple values. Now let’s write one without looking anywhere!

Uhhh… my imagination is broken. I’m going to look at Control.Lens.Fold to choose a fold to reimplement.

[looks]

Meh. Most things there – like worded – are not folds, but traversals or something else in disguise, and other things are more general than folds. We don’t have much choice – let’s do folded .

folded :: Foldable t => Fold (t a) a (t a) a

(Actually it’s an IndexedFold , but I’m still ignoring everything indexed.)

Foldable

Just in case you don’t know what Foldable is: it’s basically a class for things that have elements and from which you can extract said elements (some of the examples are Maybe , Set , lists, trees, etc). A popular definition is “everything that can be turned into a list”, since toList is method of Foldable :

class Foldable t where ... toList :: t a -> [a] t a[a] ...

However, it’s a bit misleading, because toList doesn’t work well on structures that can be infinite to the left. A snoc list, for instance (“snoc” is “cons” backwards):

data SList a = Empty | SList a :> a

An infinite snoc list has a last element, but no first element; thus, you can’t apply toList to it and get back anything. But you can still apply foldMap – which is the real fundamental method of Foldable – to it and get something back! Here’s the type of foldMap :

-- Map each element of the structure to a monoid, and combine the results. foldMap :: ( Monoid m, Foldable t) => (a -> m) -> t a -> m m,t)(am)t a

I’ve no idea whether it’s easy to understand what it does or not so easy, but the best way to understand is probably just to look at the implementation for trees:

data Tree a = Leaf a | Branch ( Tree a) a ( Tree a) a) a (a) instance Foldable Tree where -- Only 1 element – apply the function to it. foldMap f ( Leaf a) = f a f (a)f a -- Several elements – combine everything that can be combined. foldMap f ( Branch left x right) = foldMap f left <> f x <> foldMap f right f (left x right)f leftf xf right

Well, actually the best way is to write your own implementation for various types, but I don’t expect you to write anything, because this is a post and posts are meant to be read and not… whatever. Back to snoc lists, here’s an instance for them as well:

instance Foldable SList where foldMap f Empty = mempty foldMap f (xs :> x) = foldMap f xs <> f x f (xsx)f xsf x

And an example of a left-infinite list:

enumS :: Int -> SList Int = enumS (n + 1 ) :> n enumS nenumS (n -- A left-infinite list. inf :: SList Int = enumS 0 infenumS

And a demonstration of how foldMap works on it, using the Last monoid:

> foldMap ( Last . Just ) inf ) inf Last {getLast = Just 0 } {getLast

If you want to read more about Foldable , there’s no good place to do it, because Foldable is simple and boring. All knowledge you need is here:

Foldable documentation.

documentation. The story about how and why Foldable got so many extra methods in GHC 7.10 (which, by the way, means that all Foldable tutorials are out of date now) and also why lots of functions in Prelude mention Foldable now when previously they were just operating on lists.

got so many extra methods in GHC 7.10 (which, by the way, means that all tutorials are out of date now) and also why lots of functions in mention now when previously they were just operating on lists. A post about that thing with snoc lists and how Foldable isn’t merely the toList class.

folded

Okay, yeah, right, back to folded . First, the signature (which I got just by expanding the definition of Fold ):

-- folded :: Foldable t => Fold (t a) a folded :: ( Contravariant f, Applicative f, Foldable t) => f,f,t) -> f a) -> t a -> f (t a) (af a)t af (t a)

At this point it would be helpful to recall the idea of getters once again.

(And at this point I also wonder: if I’m writing this whole thing and it takes me more than a dozen repetitions to understand what I’m doing, could it be a clue that something isn’t right with my brain? To rephrase: am I dumb?)

The idea is as follows:

The getter is given a function which hides an a in the functor. For instance, Const .

in the functor. For instance, . This function is applied to the target element.

The type of the result, f a , is changed to match the type we need to get – f s (but the a is still stored in the functor).

, is changed to match the type we need to get – (but the is still stored in the functor). That’s all, the a has been safely carried out and can then be extracted from the result.

With folds, it becomes a bit more interesting. Instead of applying the function to one element, we apply it to every element we need to carry out – and then we combine resulting functors. It’s not something we could actually do with functors, but that’s exactly why Fold has an Applicative constraint instead – unlike ordinary functors, applicative functors can be combined.

If this isn’t very clear, it’ll become clearer in a moment.

= ... folded f s

Okay, so we have f :: a -> f a and s :: t a . The only thing to do is to apply one to the other, which is something that foldMap does:

foldMap f s :: f a f a

(The reason the result is f a is that each function returns an f a and then those are simply combined into a single f a .)

Finally, the type has to be changed from f a to f (t a) , and that’s what coerce does. Thus, the definition of folded is:

= coerce $ foldMap f s folded f scoercef s

Except that it’s not, because if you try to compile it, you would get this type error:

Could not deduce (Data.Monoid.Monoid (f a)) … arising from a use of ‘foldMap’ from the context (Contravariant f, Applicative f, Foldable t) bound by the type signature for folded :: (Contravariant f, Applicative f, Foldable t) => (a -> f a) -> t a -> f (t a)

How so? Well, apparently there’s no instance of Monoid for f a , even if we know that if f is Contravariant and Applicative , f a has to be a Monoid . No problem, we’ll just make a newtype and write our own instance.

newtype Folding f a = Folding { getFolding :: f a } f af a }

(It’s tempting to just write an instance like (...) => Monoid (f a) without bothering with newtypes, but then you’re going to have a huge problem with overlapping instances because – remember – GHC doesn’t look at the constraints when resolving instances, so it would overlap with everything else from [a] to Maybe a .)

Here goes:

instance ( Contravariant f, Applicative f) => Monoid ( Folding f a) where f,f)f a)

To make it easier, just pretend that f is Const here. Do you remember the discussion of monoids and applicative functors from the previous part, where we used the Monoid r => Applicative (Const r) instance? Well, now we go backwards from that – if something is Const -like and also Applicative , we assume that it hides a monoid inside.

pure for Applicative (Const r) :

pure _ = Const mempty

mempty for Folding :

mempty = Folding (coerce $ pure ()) (coerce())

<*> for Applicative (Const r) :

Const f <*> Const v = Const (f `mappend` v) (fv)

mappend for Folding :

mappend ( Folding fa) ( Folding fb) = Folding (fa *> fb) fa) (fb)(fafb)

The resulting instance again because I’m not sure that the mess I wrote before is understandable:

instance ( Contravariant f, Applicative f) => Monoid ( Folding f a) where f,f)f a) mempty = Folding (coerce $ pure ()) (coerce()) mappend ( Folding fa) ( Folding fb) = Folding (fa *> fb) fa) (fb)(fafb)

And folded itself, with newtype wrapping and unwrapping:

= coerce . getFolding $ foldMap ( Folding . f) s folded f scoercegetFoldingf) s

And a demonstration:

> Just True ^.. folded folded [ True ]

The Monoid formulation of Fold

If you have looked at Control.Lens.Fold , you could’ve noticed this alternative explanation of Fold at the top:

A Fold s a is a generalization of something Foldable . It allows you to extract multiple results from a container. A Foldable container can be characterized by the behavior of foldMap :: ( Foldable t, Monoid m) => (a -> m) -> t a -> m t,m)(am)t a Since we want to be able to work with monomorphic containers, we could generalize this signature to forall m . Monoid m => (a -> m) -> s -> m (am) and then decorate it with Const to obtain type Fold s a = forall m . Monoid m => Getting m s a s am s a Every Getter is a valid Fold that simply doesn’t use the Monoid it is passed. In practice the type we use is slightly more complicated to allow for better error messages and for it to be transformed by certain Applicative transformers.

It’s a pretty clear explanation, and I don’t really have anything to add to it.

both

This one is an exercise, which is much simpler than folded and so should be really trivial if it has clicked for you.

bothF :: Fold (a, a) a (a, a) a = ... bothF f s

> ( 1 , 2 ) ^.. bothF bothF [ 1 , 2 ]

If you did it right, your code should be simpler than the code for actual both .

Also, by the way, write actual both :: Traversal' (a, a) a as well.

Also, using both in the definition of bothF is prohibited.

Also, I have said before that I don’t expect you to write anything, but come on, this one is really simple. If you don’t write it or at least spell mentally in your head, you’re a chicken.

replicated

Yet another fold to reimplement because reimplementing things is so fun.

Fine, not really.

Whatever.

> 5 ^.. replicated 3 replicated [ 5 , 5 , 5 ]

It’d be as easy as bothF if we had replicateA , but we only have replicateM and that one is for monads and not applicatives, so we have to write it ourselves with sequenceA and replicate :

replicated :: Int -> Fold a a a a = coerce $ sequenceA ( replicate n (f s)) replicated n f scoercen (f s))

Combining folds

There’s a somewhat not very well-known trick for combining folds. Say, we want to make a fold that would combine elements from several folds – how could we do it?

Pretty easy, actually. Just get the result from one fold, from another fold, and combine them with *> :

foldCombine :: Fold s a -> Fold s a -> Fold s a s as as a = \l s -> fa l s *> fb l s foldCombine fa fb\l sfa l sfb l s

> ( 1 , 2 ) ^.. foldCombine _2 _1 foldCombine _2 _1 [ 2 , 1 ]

However, for common usage – when you’re going to apply ^.. or something like that straight away – there’s a much simpler way. Just use <> :

> ( 1 , 2 , 3 ) ^.. (_3 <> _1 <> _2) (_3_1_2) [ 3 , 1 , 2 ]

Why does it work? There are 2 pieces to the puzzle:

Due to an existing instance of Monoid b => Monoid (a -> b) , all functions with any amount of arguments – provided that the result is a monoid – are monoids themselves. Usually the functor used in place of f would be Const , and it’s a monoid already without the need for Folding and our additional instance.

(If it’s still not clear, then I guess it’s going to be another exercise.)

Fold1

An ordinary Fold can easily return 0 elements. Can we write a type for folds that have to return 1 or more elements?

With the monoid formulation, it’d be pretty easy – just replace Monoid with Semigroup . (A semigroup is a monoid without mempty , and we might get them in base soon, or we might not. Currently they live in the semigroups package, and it has more dependencies than I would like. Actually, I don’t use lens itself for the same reason.) Anyway, since a fold with a Semigroup m constraint would have to work on anything that is a semigroup, and a non-empty list is a semigroup, there’d be no way for it to return an empty list. Ha.

However, we use the Contravariant f, Applicative f formulation. Here, the analog of mempty is pure – so, to get rid of empty folds, we have to get rid of pure . Is there some class which gives us composition without pure ?..

Yep. It’s called Apply , it lives in Edward’s semigroupoids package, and its sole operation is <.> ( .> and <. don’t count). With it, we can declare Fold1 :

type Fold1 s a = forall f . ( Contravariant f, Apply f) => s af,f) -> f a) -> s -> f s (af a)f s

And with .> , we can write non-empty folds. Such as iterated , for instance:

> 3 ^.. takingWhile ( < 100000000 ) (iterated ( ^ 2 )) takingWhile () (iterated ()) [ 3 , 9 , 81 , 6561 , 43046721 ] > 3 ^.. iterated ( ^ 2 ) iterated ( [ 3 , 9 , 81 , 6561 , 43046721 , ...

iterated :: (a -> a) -> Fold1 a a (aa)a a = go a iterated f g ago a where go a = g a .> go (f a) go ag ago (f a)

Open question: iterated doesn’t actually use Contravariant , so its real type signature is

Apply f => (a -> a) -> (a -> f a) -> a -> f a (aa)(af a)f a Apply f => (a -> a) -> LensLike' f a a (aa)f a a

and if you tried to apply set or over to it, everything would typecheck. Can this less restricted iterated can be used in any way in which our iterated can’t?

Oh, and by the way: the same trick gives us Traversal1 , which traverses 1 or more values. Another name for it is “relevant traversal”.

Some googling revealed that nobody ever uses Traversal1 or Fold1 (in public..?), so I can’t say when they are useful.

Fold by itself is probably not very useful either, because most things that are folds are actually more than folds, the same way most instances of Foldable are also functors.

Such is life.