Reusing patterns in pattern guards or case expressions

Question

My Haskell project includes an expression evaluator, which for the purposes of this question can be simplified to:

data Expression a where
    I :: Int ->         


        

Answer 1

This answer is inspired by rampion's follow-up question, which suggests the following function:

step :: Expression a -> Expression a
step x = case x of
  Add (I x) (I y) -> I $ x + y
  Mul (I x) (I y) -> I $ x * y
  Eq  (I x) (I y) -> B $ x == y
  And (B x) (B y) -> B $ x && y
  Or  (B x) (B y) -> B $ x || y
  If  (B b) x y   -> if b then x else y
  z               -> z

step looks at a single term, and reduces it if everything needed to reduce it is present. Equiped with step, we only need a way to replace a term everywhere in the expression tree. We can start by defining a way to apply a function inside every term.

{-# LANGUAGE RankNTypes #-}

emap :: (forall a. Expression a -> Expression a) -> Expression x -> Expression x
emap f x = case x of
    I a -> I a
    B a -> B a
    Add x y   -> Add (f x) (f y)
    Mul x y   -> Mul (f x) (f y)
    Eq  x y   -> Eq  (f x) (f y)
    And x y   -> And (f x) (f y)
    Or  x y   -> Or  (f x) (f y)
    If  x y z -> If  (f x) (f y) (f z)

Now, we need to apply a function everywhere, both to the term and everywhere inside the term. There are two basic possibilities, we could apply the function to the term before applying it inside or we could apply the function afterwards.

premap :: (forall a. Expression a -> Expression a) -> Expression x -> Expression x
premap f = emap (premap f) . f

postmap :: (forall a. Expression a -> Expression a) -> Expression x -> Expression x
postmap f = f . emap (postmap f)

This gives us two possibilities for how to use step, which I will call shorten and reduce.

shorten = premap step
reduce = postmap step

These behave a little differently. shorten removes the innermost level of terms, replacing them with literals, shortening the height of the expression tree by one. reduce completely evaluates the expression tree to a literal. Here's the result of iterating each of these on the same input

"shorten"
If (And (B True) (Or (B False) (B True))) (Add (I 1) (Mul (I 2) (I 3))) (I 0)
If (And (B True) (B True)) (Add (I 1) (I 6)) (I 0)
If (B True) (I 7) (I 0)
I 7
"reduce"
If (And (B True) (Or (B False) (B True))) (Add (I 1) (Mul (I 2) (I 3))) (I 0)
I 7

Partial reduction

Your question implies that you sometimes expect that expressions can't be reduced completely. I'll extend your example to include something to demonstrate this case, by adding a variable, Var.

data Expression a where
    Var :: Expression Int
    ...

We will need to add support for Var to emap:

emap f x = case x of
   Var -> Var
   ...

bind will replace the variable, and evaluateFor performs a complete evaluation, traversing the expression only once.

bind :: Int -> Expression a -> Expression a
bind a x = case x of
    Var -> I a
    z   -> z

evaluateFor :: Int -> Expression a -> Expression a
evaluateFor a = postmap (step . bind a)

Now reduce iterated on an example containing a variable produces the following output

"reduce"
If (And (B True) (Or (B False) (B True))) (Add (I 1) (Mul Var (I 3))) (I 0)
Add (I 1) (Mul Var (I 3))

If the output expression from the reduction is evaluated for a specific value of Var, we can reduce the expression all the way to a literal.

"evaluateFor 5"
Add (I 1) (Mul Var (I 3))
I 16

Applicative

emap can instead be written in terms of an Applicative Functor, and postmap can be made into a generic piece of code suitable for other data types than expressions. How to do so is described in this answer to rampion's follow-up question.