free-functors

Free functors, adjoint to functors that forget class constraints.

https://github.com/sjoerdvisscher/free-functors

Latest on Hackage:

1.2.1

This package is not currently in any snapshots. If you're interested in using it, we recommend adding it to Stackage Nightly. Doing so will make builds more reliable, and allow stackage.org to host generated Haddocks.

BSD-3-Clause licensed by Sjoerd Visscher

Maintained by [email protected]

A free functor is a left adjoint to a forgetful functor. It used to be the case that the only category that was easy to work with in Haskell was Hask itself, so there were no interesting forgetful functors.

But the new ConstraintKinds feature of GHC provides an easy way of creating subcategories of Hask. That brings interesting opportunities for free (and cofree) functors.

The examples directory contains an implementation of non-empty lists as free semigroups, and automata as free actions. The standard example of free higher order functors is free monads, and this definition can be found in Data.Functor.HFree.