Clowns to the Left of me , Jokers to the Right Dissecting Data Structures

This paper, submitted as a ‘pearl’, introduces a small but useful generalisation to the ‘derivative’ operation on datatypes underlying Huet’s notion of ‘zipper’ (Huet 1997; McBride 2001; Abbott et al. 2005b), giving a concrete representation to one-hole contexts in data which is in mid-transformation. This operator, ‘dissection’, turns a container-like functor into a bifunctor representing a onehole context in which elements to the left of the hole are distinguished in type from elements to its right. I present dissection for polynomial functors, although it is certainly more general, preferring to concentrate here on its diverse applications. For a start, map-like operations over the functor and fold-like operations over the recursive data structure it induces can be expressed by tail recursion alone. Moreover, the derivative is readily recovered from the dissection, along with Huet’s navigation operations. A further special case of dissection, ‘division’, captures the notion of leftmost hole, canonically distinguishing values with no elements from those with at least one. By way of a more practical example, division and dissection are exploited to give a relatively efficient generic algorithm for abstracting all occurrences of one term from another in a first-order syntax. The source code for the paper is available online and compiles with recent extensions to the Glasgow Haskell Compiler.