Symmetric lenses

• Authors: Martin Hofmann;Benjamin Pierce;Daniel Wagner
• Venue: Proceedings of the 38th annual ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages
• Year: 2011

Lenses--bidirectional transformations between pairs of connected structures--have been extensively studied and are beginning to find their way into industrial practice. However, some aspects of their foundations remain poorly understood. In particular, most previous work has focused on the special case of asymmetric lenses, where one of the structures is taken as primary and the other is thought of as a projection, or view. A few studies have considered symmetric variants, where each structure contains information not present in the other, but these all lack the basic operation of composition. Moreover, while many domain-specific languages based on lenses have been designed, lenses have not been thoroughly explored from an algebraic perspective. We offer two contributions to the theory of lenses. First, we present a new symmetric formulation, based on complements, an old idea from the database literature. This formulation generalizes the familiar structure of asymmetric lenses, and it admits a good notion of composition. Second, we explore the algebraic structure of the space of symmetric lenses. We present generalizations of a number of known constructions on asymmetric lenses and settle some longstanding questions about their properties---in particular, we prove the existence of (symmetric monoidal) tensor products and sums and the non-existence of full categorical products or sums in the category of symmetric lenses. We then show how the methods of universal algebra can be applied to build iterator lenses for structured data such as lists and trees, yielding lenses for operations like mapping, filtering, and concatenation from first principles. Finally, we investigate an even more general technique for constructing mapping combinators, based on the theory of containers.