A Functional Programming Technique for Forms in Graphical User Interfaces

This paper presents FunctionalForms, a combinator library for constructing fully functioning forms in a concise and flexible way. A form is a part of a graphical user interface (GUI) restricted to displaying a value and allowing the user to modify it. The library is built on top of the medium-level GUI library wxHaskell. To obtain complete separation between the structure of a form’s layout and that of the edited values, we introduce a novel use of compositional functional references.