Documentation

A Divisible contravariant functor is the contravariant analogue of Applicative.

Continuing the intuition that Contravariant functors consume input, a Divisible contravariant functor also has the ability to be composed "beside" another contravariant functor.

Serializers provide a good example of Divisible contravariant functors. To begin let's start with the type of serializers for specific types:

newtype Serializer a = Serializer { runSerializer :: a -> ByteString }

This is a contravariant functor:

instance Contravariant Serializer where
  contramap f s = Serializer (runSerializer s . f)

That is, given a serializer for a (s :: Serializer a), and a way to turn bs into as (a mapping f :: b -> a), we have a serializer for b: contramap f s :: Serializer b.

Divisible gives us a way to combine two serializers that focus on different parts of a structure. If we postulate the existance of two primitive serializers - string :: Serializer String and int :: Serializer Int, we would like to be able to combine these into a serializer for pairs of Strings and Ints. How can we do this? Simply run both serializer and combine their output!

data StringAndInt = StringAndInt String Int

stringAndInt :: Serializer StringAndInt
stringAndInt = Serializer $ (StringAndInt s i) ->
  let sBytes = runSerializer string s
      iBytes = runSerializer int i
  in sBytes <> iBytes

divide is a generalization by also taking a contramap like function to split any a into a pair. This conveniently allows you to target fields of a record, for instance, by extracting the values under two fields and combining them into a tuple.

To complete the example, here is how to write stringAndInt using a Divisible instance:

instance Divisible Serializer where
  conquer = Serializer (const mempty)

  divide toBC bSerializer cSerializer = Serializer $ a ->
    case toBC a of
      (b, c) ->
        let bBytes = runSerializer bSerializer b
            cBytes = runSerializer cSerializer c
        in bBytes <> cBytes

stringAndInt :: Serializer StringAndInt
stringAndInt =
  divide ((StringAndInt s i) -> (s, i)) string int

divided = divide id

Redundant, but provided for symmetry.

conquered = conquer

A combination of a divisible functor with some input for it. Allows to use the Monoid API for composition.