[Haskell-beginners] Type of function with constant pattern

[j.romildo at gmail.com]

On Tue, Apr 10, 2012 at 02:16:15PM -0700, Tim Perry wrote:
> I believe that "f 0 = ..." is a guard and the guard is pattern matching on
> the constructor. Despite the fact that you don't have an instance of "f _ =
> ....", the compiler needs an Eq instance to determine if it should run the
> "f 0" version of the function.
> 
> Does that make sense? Hopefully someone with a better grasp of the topic
> will fill in the details.

I think you are using the wrong terms. The given examples does not make
any use of guards. Guards are boolean expressions attached to the right
side of equations. They are used to select one from many possible right
sides of the equation: the first one whose guard evaluates to True is
chosen. (Of course the patterns used as formal parameters should first
match the actual arguments.)

For instance

    sign x | x <  0 = -1
           | x == 0 = 0
           | x >  0 = 1

defines a function using an equation with three guards.

I think pattern matching with constant data construtors is not related
to the (==) or (/=) methods defined in class Eq. At least I was not able
to find that out on the documentation.

For this reason I am not understand why Eq is used when pattern matching
with numeric constants, as shown in the original post.

So, Tim's explanation is not making sense to me.
]

Romildo

> On Tue, Apr 10, 2012 at 12:57 PM, <j.romildo at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > Given the following function definitions
> >
> >   f 0 = True
> >
> >   g False = True
> >
> > ghc infers the following types for the functions:
> >
> >   f :: (Eq a, Num a) => a -> Bool
> >   g :: Bool -> Bool
> >
> > Why f has "Eq a" in the context in ts type, and g does not?
> >
> > As both are defined using a constant pattern, I expected none of them
> > should require the type of the argument to be instance of Eq.