[Haskell-cafe] haltavista - look for functions by example
paul.brauner at loria.fr
Sun Sep 19 14:29:05 EDT 2010
That's a great idea!
In the same vein, have you had a look at quickspec by Koen Claessen,
Nicholas Smallbone and John Hughes?
This reminds me of another idea, suggested by Jun inoue: look for
functions by specification instead of examples.
I will try your idea ASAP. As you say, I think that might be helpful for
beginners, as you suggest, or even when you're not a beginner anymore
but you start using a new library.
On Sun, Sep 19, 2010 at 07:41:21PM +0200, Roel van Dijk wrote:
> Very interesting!
> It got me thinking: if you combine this with the Arbitrary class 
> of QuickCheck you can use it check if you have defined a function that
> is "equal" to an already defined function.
> Let's say I write the following function:
> intMul ∷ Integer → Integer → Integer
> intMul x 0 = 0
> intMul x n = x + intMul x (n - 1)
> No you can automatically apply this function to a list of 100
> generated inputs to get a list of input output pairs. Feed this into
> haltavista and it should tell you that you can replace your definition
> with Prelude (*). While such an observation is certainly not a proof
> it is still useful.
> It would be a nice addition to a Haskell editor. Especially for those
> new to the language.
> 1 - http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/QuickCheck/2.3/doc/html/Test-QuickCheck-Arbitrary.html
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