Strengthening the Zipper

The zipper is a well known design pattern for providing a cursor-like interface to a data structure. However, the classic treatise by Huet only scratches the surface of some of its potential applications. In this paper we take inspiration from Huet, and describe a library suitable as an underpinning for structured editors. We consider a zipper structure that is suitable for traversing heterogeneous data types, encoding routes to other places in the tree (for bookmark or quick-jump functionality), expressing lexically bound information using contexts, and traversals for rendering a program indicating where the cursor is currently focused. Key words: zipper, cursor, boilerplate, bookmarks, traversal, generalized algebraic data types,

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: ENTCS
• Authors: Tristan O. R. Allwood, Susan Eisenbach
• Keywords: Data Types, ENTCS 2010, Heterogeneous Data Types, Software Engineering, Zipper