Edit Lenses

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Departmental Papers (CIS)
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Computer Sciences
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Hoffmann, Martin
Wagner, Daniel
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A lens is a bidirectional transformation between a pair of connected data structures, capable of translating an edit on one structure into an appropriate edit on the other. Many varieties of lenses have been studied, but none, to date, has offered a satisfactory treatment of how edits are represented. Many foundational accounts [5, 7] only consider edits of the form “overwrite the whole structure,” leading to poor behavior in many situations by failing to track the associations between corresponding parts of the structures when elements are inserted and deleted in ordered lists, for example. Other theories of lenses do maintain these associations, either by annotating the structures themselves with change information [6, 15] or using auxiliary data structures [2, 4], but every extant theory assumes that the entire original source structure is part of the information passed to the lens. We offer a general theory of edit lenses, which work with descriptions of changes to structures, rather than with the structures themselves. We identify a simple notion of “editable structure”—a set of states plus a monoid of edits with a partial monoid action on the states—and construct a semantic space of lenses between such structures, with natural laws governing their behavior. We show how a range of constructions from earlier papers on “statebased” lenses can be carried out in this space, including composition, products, sums, list operations, etc. Further, we show how to construct edit lenses for arbitrary containers in the sense of Abbott, Altenkirch, and Ghani [1]. Finally, we show that edit lenses refine a well-known formulation of state-based lenses [7], in the sense that every state-based lens gives rise to an edit lens over structures with a simple overwrite-only edit language, and conversely every edit lens on such structures gives rise to a state-based lens.

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2012-01-01
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Departmental Papers (CIS)
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2023-05-17T07:14:58.000
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Martin Hofmann, Benjamin C. Pierce, and Daniel Wagner. Edit Lenses. In ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL), Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, January 2012. ACM COPYRIGHT NOTICE. Copyright © 2012 by the Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from Publications Dept., ACM, Inc., fax +1 (212) 869-0481, or permissions@acm.org. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2103656.2103715
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