[Haskell-cafe] type families and type signatures

[Lennart Augustsson]

Let's look at this example from a higher level.

Haskell is a language which allows you to write type signatures for
functions, and even encourages you to do it.
Sometimes you even have to do it.  Any language feature that stops me from
writing a type signature is in my opinion broken.
TFs as implemented in currently implemented ghc stops me from writing type
signatures.  They are thus, in my opinion, broken.

A definition should either be illegal or it should be able to have a
signature.  I think this is a design goal.  It wasn't true in Haskell 98,
and it's generally agreed that this was a mistake.

To summarize: I don't care if the definition is useless, I want to be able
to give it a type signature anyway.

(It's also pretty easy to fix the problem.)

  -- Lennart

On Wed, Apr 9, 2008 at 7:20 AM, Martin Sulzmann <martin.sulzmann at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Manuel said earlier that the source of the problem here is foo's ambiguous
> type signature
> (I'm switching back to the original, simplified example).
> Type checking with ambiguous type signatures is hard because the type
> checker has to guess
> types and this guessing step may lead to too many (ambiguous) choices. But
> this doesn't mean
> that this worst case scenario always happens.
>
> Consider your example again
>
> type family Id a
>
> type instance Id Int = Int
>
> foo :: Id a -> Id a
> foo = id
>
> foo' :: Id a -> Id a
> foo' = foo
>
> The type checking problem for foo' boils down to verifying the formula
>
> forall a. exists b. Id a ~ Id b
>
> Of course for any a we can pick b=a to make the type equation statement
> hold.
> Fairly easy here but the point is that the GHC type checker doesn't do any
> guessing
> at all. The only option you have (at the moment, there's still lots of
> room for improving
> GHC's type checking process) is to provide some hints, for example
> mimicking
> System F style type application by introducing a type proxy argument in
> combination
> with lexically scoped type variables.
>
> foo :: a -> Id a -> Id a
> foo _ = id
>
> foo' :: Id a -> Id a
> foo' = foo (undefined :: a)
>
>
> Martin
>
>
>
> Ganesh Sittampalam wrote:
>
> > On Wed, 9 Apr 2008, Manuel M T Chakravarty wrote:
> >
> >  Sittampalam, Ganesh:
> > >
> >
> >  No, I meant can't it derive that equality when matching (Id a) against
> > > > (Id b)? As you say, it can't derive (a ~ b) at that point, but (Id a ~ Id b)
> > > > is known, surely?
> > > >
> > >
> > > No, it is not know.  Why do you think it is?
> > >
> >
> > Well, if the types of foo and foo' were forall a . a -> a and forall b .
> > b -> b, I would expect the type-checker to unify a and b in the argument
> > position and then discover that this equality made the result position unify
> > too. So why can't the same happen but with Id a and Id b instead?
> >
> >  The problem is really with foo and its signature, not with any use of
> > > foo. The function foo is (due to its type) unusable.  Can't you change foo?
> > >
> >
> > Here's a cut-down version of my real code. The type family Apply is very
> > important because it allows me to write class instances for things that
> > might be its first parameter, like Id and Comp SqlExpr Maybe, without paying
> > the syntactic overhead of forcing client code to use Id/unId and
> > Comp/unComp. It also squishes nested Maybes which is important to my
> > application (since SQL doesn't have them).
> >
> > castNum is the simplest example of a general problem - the whole point
> > is to allow clients to write code that is overloaded over the first
> > parameter to Apply using primitives like castNum. I'm not really sure how I
> > could get away from the ambiguity problem, given that desire.
> >
> > Cheers,
> >
> > Ganesh
> >
> > {-# LANGUAGE TypeFamilies, GADTs, UndecidableInstances,
> > NoMonomorphismRestriction #-}
> >
> > newtype Id a = Id { unId :: a }
> > newtype Comp f g x = Comp { unComp :: f (g x) }
> >
> > type family Apply (f :: * -> *) a
> >
> > type instance Apply Id a = a
> > type instance Apply (Comp f g) a = Apply f (Apply g a)
> > type instance Apply SqlExpr a = SqlExpr a
> > type instance Apply Maybe Int = Maybe Int
> > type instance Apply Maybe Double = Maybe Double
> > type instance Apply Maybe (Maybe a) = Apply Maybe a
> >
> > class DoubleToInt s where
> >   castNum :: Apply s Double -> Apply s Int
> >
> > instance DoubleToInt Id where
> >   castNum = round
> >
> > instance DoubleToInt SqlExpr where
> >   castNum = SECastNum
> >
> > data SqlExpr a where
> >  SECastNum :: SqlExpr Double -> SqlExpr Int
> >
> > castNum' :: (DoubleToInt s) => Apply s Double -> Apply s Int
> > castNum' = castNum
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Haskell-Cafe mailing list
> > Haskell-Cafe at haskell.org
> > http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
> >
>
> _______________________________________________
> Haskell-Cafe mailing list
> Haskell-Cafe at haskell.org
> http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/attachments/20080409/7b9cf57b/attachment.htm