XHaskell - Adding regular expression types to haskell

Abstract

Functional programming and XML form a good match. Higher order function and parametric polymorphism equip the programmer with powerful abstraction facilities while pattern matching over algebraic data types allows for a convenient notation to specify XML transformation. Previous works in extending Haskell with XML processing features focus ongiving a data model for XML values, so that XML transformations can be expressed in terms of Haskell combinators. Unfortunately, XML processing in Haskell does not provide the same static guarantees compared to XML processing in domain specific language such as XDuce and CDuce. In this thesis, we introduce an extension of Haskell, baptized XHaskell, which integrates XDuce features such as regular expression types, subtyping and regular expression pattern matching into Haskell. In addition, we also support the combination of regular expression types parametric polymorphism and type classes which to the best of our knowledge has not been studied before.