[Haskell-beginners] distinguished types

[Rick Murphy]

Greetings and thanks in advance for all the great work on this list.

Being new Haskell I hope someone could help me clarify the use of the 
term *distinguished type* in relation to Haskell 98 as well as confirm 
my understanding of the construction of a distinguished type in GHC.

I understand from [1] that a distinguised type is defined as a type with 
only one non-bottom value and that value is in fact identical to the 
name of the type. [1] provides the unit type () as an example of a 
Haskell distinguished type.

Would it be accurate to say that an approach to creating distinguished 
types in Haskell is to create data types with a single constructor whose 
name is identical to the data type name?

More specifically, would

 > data F = F deriving (Show)

create a distinguished type F in Haskell?

I've searched the Haskell Report, but there's no indication that the 
report recognizes distinguished types. Is that true and if so why ?

1. http://okmij.org/ftp/Scheme/misc.html

-- 
Rick

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