Deprecate Foldable for Either

[Tony Morris]

I am opposed too.

Aside from the technical reasons, which have already been discussed and
decided, confused students dictating language and library design has never
worked out well.


On Thu, Mar 9, 2017 at 12:49 PM, Andrew Martin <andrew.thaddeus at gmail.com>
wrote:

> I am opposed to making this change. I have the same objections that others
> on this thread do. It's unfortunate that the concat put in scope by the
> Prelude is the one from Data.Foldable and not the one from GHC.OldList. I
> do not think that removing Foldable instances is an appropriate solution to
> this problem though.
>
> On Thu, Mar 2, 2017 at 11:22 AM, Andreas Abel <andreas.abel at ifi.lmu.de>
> wrote:
>
>> Today a student came to me wondering why a certain function produced a
>> regular result, where he had expected an error.  Turned out he had used
>> `concat`, but not on a lists of lists as he had thought, but on a lists of
>> `Either a [b]`.
>>
>> With the Foldable instance for Either, which considers Either a b to be a
>> container of 0-1 elements of b, errors are happily swallowed.
>>
>> I think this instance is harmful and should be deprecated (and later
>> removed) from base.
>>
>> There are similarly pointless Foldable instances as well.
>>
>> See a discussion one year ago, which was heated, but had no consequences.
>>
>> https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/libraries/2016-February/026678.html
>>
>>
>> --
>> Andreas Abel  <><      Du bist der geliebte Mensch.
>>
>> Department of Computer Science and Engineering
>> Chalmers and Gothenburg University, Sweden
>>
>> andreas.abel at gu.se
>> http://www.cse.chalmers.se/~abela/
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>>
>
>
>
> --
> -Andrew Thaddeus Martin
>
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