Add a very rough draft of the idris catemorphisms article I found lying around
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content/blog/idris_catamorphisms.md
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content/blog/idris_catamorphisms.md
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---
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title: "Induction Principles from Base Functors"
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date: 2022-04-22T12:19:22-07:00
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tags: ["Idris"]
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draft: true
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---
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In the [Haskell catamorphisms article]({{< relref "haskell_catamorphisms" >}}), we looked
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at how base functors and functions of the type `F a -> a` can be used to
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derive "fold" functions on inductive data types. This formulation allows for
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one more interesting trick, one that I found to be extremely interesting and
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worth covering. However, this trick requires a more powerful type system
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than Haskell provides us; it requires depdendent types.
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This article assumes a working knowledge of dependent types. I will not
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spend time explaining dependent types, nor the syntax for them in Idris,
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which is the language I'll use in this article. Below are a few resources
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that should help you get up to speed.
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{{< todo >}}List resources{{< /todo >}}
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We've seen that, given a function `F a -> a`, we can define a function
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`B -> a`, if `F` is a base functor of the type `B`. However, what if
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the goal is to define a function in which the return type `a` depends
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on the value of `B`? In other words, what if we want to define a function
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with type:
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```Idris
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someFunction : (b : B) -> P b
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```
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How might we achieve such a thing? Unlike the generic type `a`, we can't
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simply place `P` into the base functor `F`; the following is completely
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invalid.
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```Idris
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-- Completely bogus
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argType : Type
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argType = F P -> P
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```
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In our case, `P` is a type family, rather than a type; in order to use it as
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a parameter to the base functor, we need to feed it an argument (of type `B`).
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Well, we've already seen one way to get a value `b` of type `B` at the type
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level: we can use a dependent function. This too is not correct, but it does get us a little bit closer to the goal.
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```Idris
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-- Still bogus
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argType : Type
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argType = (b : B) -> F (P b) -> P b
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```
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Recall that the base functor `F` effectively denotes a single layer of a data
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structure, with recursive
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