Generic Programming with Combinators and Objects

TL;DR

This paper introduces a generic programming framework for OCAML that leverages object-oriented features and polymorphic variants to enable extensible and composable transformations across diverse data types.

Contribution

It presents a novel framework that combines object-oriented features and polymorphic variants in OCAML for flexible, extensible data transformations.

Findings

Supports large-scale type definitions

Enables overriding default transformations

Facilitates composable data type transformations

Abstract

We present a generic programming framework for OCAML which makes it possible to implement extensible transformations for a large scale of type definitions. Our framework makes use of objectoriented features of OCAML, utilising late binding to override the default behaviour of generated transformations. The support for polymorphic variant types complements the ability to describe composable data types with the ability to implement composable transformations.