[Scheme-reports] WG2 Scheme and Polymporphism

[Denis Washington <denisw@x>]

Hello,

Now with the WG1 process nearing its final draft, I thought it might be 
time to think about what would be great to have in WG2. (I am neither a 
WG1 or WG2 member, but I care a lot about Scheme.) There seem to be 
quite a lot of ideas and proposals for this on the WG wiki already [1], 
but I think that a major thing is missing that I would expect from a 
modern language in this age: first-class support for polymorphism and 
generic programming.

I guess (hope?) most of us agree that polymorphism is an invaluable tool 
for creating more flexible software architectures and often 
easier-to-read code. Unfortunately, Scheme lacks support for 
polymorphism almost everywhere; with the notable exception of arithmetic 
procedures, most of R5RS' (and R7RS') standard procedures are through 
and through non-polymorphic.

Take the sequence operations as an example. Each of them only works on a 
specific type of sequence - there are separate procedures to retrieve 
the length of a list, a vector, a bytevector or a string, for instance. 
As a consequence, it is impossible to write procedures that operate on 
arbitrary sequences without excessive special-casing. For instance, 
writing a generic version of "map" or "filter" would require an ugly 
"cond" expression handling each type of sequence individually. And even 
then, there would still be the problem that there would be no way to 
create user-defined types that act "as if" they were sequences (like 
e.g. lazy sequences or streams).

I don't think that this is an acceptable situation in 2011. Therefore I 
think that we should bring extensible and efficiently implementable 
means of polymorphism to Scheme to WG2 Scheme, that is:

- Adding generic variant to the set of WG1 procedures where appropiate, 
and/or redefining existing WG1 procedures to be generic. (For instance, 
"map" could be redefined to work on arbitrary sequences, with a new 
"list-map" procedure handling the special case of lists.)

- Adding a way for programmers to define new kinds of polymorphic (sets 
of) procedures.

For the latter, I propose to look into adding something like the 
"protocols" feature of Clojure [2] into Scheme. In short, this feature 
allows the definition of a set of procedures that would have to be 
implemented for a type to "conform to the protocol". The implementations 
exist independently of the protocol definition, often in different 
modules. It is then possible to just write code against the protocol 
procedures and ignore the concrete type of the objects operated on. 
Protocol procedures are namespaced through the module they are defined 
in, so there are never name clashes when a type implements multiple 
protocols with identically named procedures (unlike interfaces in Java 
or C#).

This mechanism only supports single type-based dispatch, but in most 
cases this is all that is needed, and this is very efficient to 
implement on most platforms (the JVM and CLR have very fast single 
dispatch, for instance).

What do you think?

Regards,
Denis

[1] http://trac.sacrideo.us/wg/wiki#WorkingGroup2
[2] http://clojure.org/protocols

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