Collection hierarchy proposal

[jpbernardy]

Well, i am as user of libraries just wants consistency of using different data structures for the same tasks. for example, i want to have one indexing operator instead of !, !! and find. so, it's my hope-list:

1. all collections are divided into 3-4 classes: arrays/lists, maps and sets. arrays/lists have sequential indexes in some range while maps have sparse indexes. also each class have an Updatable subclass
2. collections in one class can be collected to each other with one (better universal) operator, such as:

   let list = cvt array
   let tree = cvt map
   

3. collections can be converted to/from Updatable subclass with help of usual freeze/thaw operators
4. all operations which are currently implemented in Data.List, Array.*, Map, Set, HashTable? modules must be bound to one of these classes, with duplicates (such as !/!!) removed. now i see the following class hierarchy:

   Collection (map, size, values)
     SetLike (union, diff)
       Set
       Map
     Indexed (indexes, !)
       Map
       Sequential (reverse, head)
         Array
         List (tail)
   

i give in parentheses examples of operations which are supported on each level of hierarchy

this will give possibility to write datastructure-independent algorithms and easily convert data to the data type which are best for each part of the program, smthg like:

a :: Map Int String <- read str
algorithm1 a
let b :: Hash Int String <- cvt a
algorithm2 b
c :: HashTable Int String <- thaw b
algorithm3 c

[jpbernardy]

solution is being built in [CollectionClassFramework]

[guest]

What about removing all reference to lists (plain type []) from the interface. E.g.

fromList :: [i] -> c   

should be something like

fromCollection :: Collection d j i -> c

Since we plan to have

instance Collection [a] a a 

this should be possible.

Same thing for toList. In fact, we don't need toList, since it *is* fromCollection, right?