[Haskell-beginners] Newtype to avoid orphans

Adrien Haxaire adrien at haxaire.org
Mon Feb 6 10:31:50 CET 2012


 Hello,

 In the library I am writing, I declare a type Vector for Data.Vector 
 Double. I then create a Num instance for it as it doesn't have one yet. 
 GHC tells me that this instance is an orphan. After reading several 
 answers to issues like mine, I want to get rid of these orphans. The 
 advice I saw mostly is to use the newtype keyword.

 Is there a way to do it nicely, instead of copying most of the API of 
 Data.Vector ?

 Now, the only thing I can see is do like in this example:

 import Data.Vector as V

 newtype VectorD = VectorD (V.Vector Double)

 map :: (Double -> Double) -> VectorD -> VectorD
 map f (VectorD v) = VectorD $ V.map f v


 Is there a better way ?

 Best regards,
 Adrien




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