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- Overloaded functions

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Overloading

CDuce: documentation: Tutorial: Overloading First functions Patterns

Overloaded functions

The simplest form for a toplevel function declaration is

    let f (t->s) x -> e

in which the body of a function is formed by a single branch `x -> e` of pattern matching. As we have seen in the previous sections, the body of a function may be formed by several branches with complex patterns.
The interface `t->s` specifies a constraint on the behavior of the function to be checked by the type system: when applied to an argument of type `t`, the function returns a result of type `s`.

Simple Overloading

In general the interface of a function may specify several such constraints, as the names3 example The general form of a toplevel function declaration is indeed:

    let f (t1->s1;...;tn->sn) p1 -> e1 | ... | pm -> em

Such a function accepts arguments of type (`t1|...|tn`); it has all the types `ti->si`, and, thus, it also has their intersection `(t1->s1)&...&(tn->sn)`

The use of several arrow types in an interface serves to give the function a more precise type. We can roughly distinguish two different uses of multiple arrow types in an interface:

- when each arrow type specifies the behavior of a different piece of code forming the body of the function, the compound interface serves to specify the overloaded behavior of the function. This is the case for the function below

        let add ( (Int,Int)->Int ; (String,String)->String )
            | (x & Int, y & Int) -> x+y
            | (x & String, y & String) -> x@y

  where each arrow type in the interface refers to a different branch of the body.

- when the arrow types specify different behavior for the same code, then the compound interface serves to give a more precise description of the behavior of the function. An example is the function names4 from Section "First functions".

There is no clear separation between these two situations since, in general, an overloaded function has body branches that specify behaviors of different arrow types of the interface but share some common portions of the code.

A more complex example

Let us examine a more complex example. Recall the types used to represent persons that we defined in Section "Getting started" that for the purpose of the example we can simplify as follows:

    type Person   = FPerson | MPerson
    type FPerson  = <person gender = "F">[ Name Children ]
    type MPerson  = <person gender = "M">[ Name Children ]
    type Children = <children>[ Person* ]
    type Name     = <name>[ PCDATA ]

We want to transform this representation of persons into a different representation that uses different tags `<man>` and `<woman>` instead of the gender attribute and, conversely, that uses an attribute instead of an element for the name. We also want to distinguish the children of a person into two different sequences, one of sons, composed of men (i.e. elements tagged by `<man>`), and the other of daughters, composed of women. Of course we also want to apply this transformation recursively to the children of a person. In practice, we want to define a function `<split>` of type `Person ->(Man | Woman)` where `Man` and `Woman` are the types:

    type Man = <man name=String>[ Sons Daughters ]
    type Woman = <woman name=String>[ Sons Daughters ]
    type Sons = <sons>[ Man* ]
    type Daughters = <daughters>[ Woman* ]

Here is a possible way to implement such a transformation:

    let fun split (MPerson -> Man ; FPerson -> Woman)
      <person gender=g>[ <name>n <children>[(mc::MPerson | fc::FPerson)*] ] ->
      (* the above pattern collects all the MPerson in mc, and all the FPerson in fc *)
         let tag = match g with "F" -> `woman | "M" -> `man in
         let s = map mc with x -> split x in
         let d = map fc with x -> split x in
         <(tag) name=n>[ <sons>s  <daughters>d ] ;;

The function `split` is declared to be an overloaded function that, when applied to a `MPerson`, returns an element of type `Man` and that, when applied to a `FPerson`, returns an element of type `Woman`. The body is composed of a single pattern matching

      <person gender=g>[ <name>n <children>[(mc::MPerson | fc::FPerson)*] ] ->

whose pattern binds four variables: `g` is bound to the gender of the argument of the function, `n` is bound to its name, `mc` is bound to the sequence of all children that are of type `MPerson`, and `fc` is bound to the sequence of all children that are of type `FPerson`.

On the next line we define `tag` to be ``man` or ``woman` according to the value of `g`.

         let tag = match g with "F" -> `woman | "M" -> `man

Then we apply `split` recursively to the elements of `mc` and `fc`.

         let s = map mc with x -> split x in
         let d = map fc with x -> split x in
         <(tag) name=n>[ <sons>s  <daughters>d ] ;;

Here is the use of overloading: since `mc` is of type `[MPerson*]`, then by the overloaded type of `split` we can deduce that `s` is of type `[Man*]`; similarly we deduce for `d` the type `[Woman*]`. From this the type checker deduces that the expressions `<sons>s` and `<daughters>` are of type `Sons` and `Daughters`, and therefore it returns for the `split` function the type `(MPerson -> Man) & (FPerson -> Woman)`. Note that the use of overloading here is critical: although `split` has also type `Person ->(Man | Woman)` (since `split` is of type `(MPerson->Man) & (FPerson->Woman)`, which is a subtype), had we declared `split` of that type, the function would not have type-checked: in the recursive calls we would have been able to deduce for `s` and for `d` the type `[ (Man | Woman)* ]`, which is not enough to type-check the result. If, for example, we wanted to define the same transformation in XDuce we would need first to apply a filter (that is our transform) to the children so as to separate male from females (while in CDuce we obtain it simply by a pattern) and then resort to two auxiliary functions that have nearly the same definition and differ only on their type, one being of type `MPerson -> Man`, the other of type `FPerson -> Woman`. The same transformation can be elegantly defined in XSLT with a moderate nloc increase, but only at the expense of loosing static type safety and type-based optimizations.

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CDuce: documentation: Tutorial: Overloading First functions Patterns