Polytypic Compact Printing and Parsing

Paper in proceeding, 1999

A generic compact printer and a corresponding parser are constructed. These programs transform values of any regular datatype to and from a bit stream. The algorithms are constructed along with a proof that printing followed by parsing is the identity. Since the binary representation is very compact, the printer can be used for compressing data - possibly supplemented with some standard algorithm for compressing bit streams. The compact printer and the parser are described in the polytypic Haskell extension PolyP.