Matching lenses: Alignment and view update

Davi M.J. Barbosa, Julien Cretin, Nate Foster, Michael Greenberg, Benjamin C. Pierce

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

37 Scopus citations

Abstract

Bidirectional programming languages are a practical approach to the view update problem. Programs in these languages, called lenses, define both a view and an update policy - i.e., every program can be read as a function mapping sources to views as well as one mapping updated views back to updated sources. One thorny issue that has not received sufficient attention in the design of bidirectional languages is alignment. In general, to correctly propagate an update to a view, a lens needs to match up the pieces of the view with the corresponding pieces of the underlying source, even after data has been inserted, deleted, or reordered. However, existing bidirectional languages either support only simple strategies that fail on many examples of practical interest, or else propose specific strategies that are baked deeply into the underlying theory. We propose a general framework of matching lenses that parameterizes lenses over arbitrary heuristics for calculating alignments. We enrich the types of lenses with "chunks" identifying reorderable pieces of the source and view that should be re-aligned after an update, and we formulate behavioral laws that capture essential constraints on the handling of chunks. We develop a core language of matching lenses for strings, together with a set of "alignment combinators" that implement a variety of alignment strategies.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationICFP'10 - Proceedings of the 2010 ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming
Pages193-204
Number of pages12
DOIs
StatePublished - 2010
Event15th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming, ICFP'10 - Baltimore, MD, United States
Duration: 27 Sep 201029 Sep 2010

Publication series

NameProceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming, ICFP

Conference

Conference15th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming, ICFP'10
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityBaltimore, MD
Period27/09/1029/09/10

Keywords

  • alignment
  • bidirectional languages
  • boomerang
  • lenses
  • view update problem

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