[Haskell-beginners] why is the :type different in ghci?

[Brandon Allbery]

On Mon, Aug 22, 2011 at 23:26, Ovidiu Deac <ovidiudeac at gmail.com> wrote:

> Prelude> :type map show
> map show :: Show a => [a] -> [String]
> Prelude> map show [1,2,3]
> ["1","2","3"]
> Prelude> let f = map show
> Prelude> :type f
> f :: [()] -> [String]
>

Ah, another victim of the MMR and extended defaulting....

Very briefly, the Haskell spec says that a binding without arguments is
monomorphic, i.e. must have a single specific type.  Your "let f =" is such
a binding.

Extended defaulting is how ghci gets itself out of that situation:  it looks
for a type in the list of default types which can be used to build a
concrete type.  Under standard defaulting rules it would fail, since the
default types are Double and Integer and the result would be an inability to
pick one; under extended defaulting, () is added and breaks the deadlock.
 So you get a defaulted monomorphic type ([()] -> [String]).

If you disable the monomorphism restriction, you will get the most general
type which is the same as you got for ":t map show".  You can also
explicitly type f:

> let f :: Show a => [a] -> String; f = map show

<interactive>:1:8:
>    No instance for (Num ())
>      arising from the literal `3'
>    Possible fix: add an instance declaration for (Num ())
>    In the expression: 3
>    In the first argument of `f', namely `[1, 2, 3]'
>    In the expression: f [1, 2, 3]
>

And this lovely bizarro-land error is because the Haskell spec causes
numeric literals to be translated to applications of fromInteger (so you
don't have to explicitly specify whether it's Int, Integer, Double, Word16,
etc.), so ghci tries to resolve

> f [fromIntegral 1, fromIntegral 2, fromIntegral 3] :: [()] -> [String]

in which fromIntegral must be (Integral a => a -> ()), but can't find a
fromIntegral instance that produces a ().

Common wisdom these days is to disable the monomorphism restriction when
working with ghci; there's a growing belief that it has outlived its
usefulness.

> :set -XNoMonomorphismRestriction

-- 
brandon s allbery                                      allbery.b at gmail.com
wandering unix systems administrator (available)     (412) 475-9364 vm/sms
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