Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Thrist sightings

It's been a bit quiet recently, but not inactive. Edward Kmett has adopted the name and the concept in two of his libraries. Of course the concept is much older than the name, being a path in some category.

If you look carefully, in the middle of his ICFP '12 keynote Conor McBride derives thrists (he keeps the name List in his development) and they may also appear in the JFP article where they are named Path.

Only with the advent of GADTs and user defined kinds in systems like Ωmega, SHE and Agda the concept of threading types begins to blossom. Since the release of GHC v7.6.1 the most popular Haskell compiler also supports kind polymorphism. This prompted me to re-spin the thrist package to take advantage of GHC's new feature.

Have fun,

    Gabor