Symmetric lenses

Abstract

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.

Coalgebraic Aspects of Bidirectional Computation.

“…In this subsection, we describe symmetric lenses (SL) [HPW11] in terms of cbx, and relate pointed bisimilarity between cbx and symmetric lens (SL-)equivalence [HPW11, Definition 3.2]. First of all, it is straightforward to describe as a cbx a symmetric lens between A and B with complement C -given by a pair of functions putr :A×C → B ×C , putl : B × C → A × C and initial state C together satisfying two laws: take M = Id and state-space X = A×C ×B , encapsulating the current value of the lens complement C , as well as those of A and B (cf.…”

“…(Note that this is not a typical category of F -coalgebras and morphisms, for some fixed functor F , but rather a category where the morphisms A → B are equivalence classes of F We now describe how this category is related (by specialising C = Set and M = Id ) to the category of symmetric lenses [HPW11]. The point of departure is that cbx encapsulate additional data, namely initial values α .get L , α .get R for A and B .…”

Viewpoint Co-evolution through Coarse-Grained Changes and Coupled Transformations

“…Other approaches use so-called correspondence rules for synchronizing models in the contexts of RM-ODP and MDWE [3,10,32]. More theoretical works propose to use different kind of lenses [8,9,12,15].…”

Symmetric delta lenses and spans of asymmetric delta lenses.

“…In [8], Hofmann et al defined and studied set-based symmetric lenses. Since then, with the study of variants of asymmetric lenses (set-based or otherwise), there has been a need for more definitions of corresponding symmetric variants.…”

“…It was already noted in [8] that there were potentially two approaches to defining set-based symmetric lenses. One involved studying various right and left operations (corresponding to what other authors call forwards and backwards operations).…”