[Haskell-beginners] Type constructors sharing a common field

[Benjamin Edwards]

>
> Thanks!
> This helps reduce the number of field names, but it does not address the
> main problem, which is the obligation of pattern matching on all
> constructors.
> The Person type is just a simple example. If you have a lot of
> constructors repeating all of them without a real reason can be
> time-consuming and boring.
>
> I am aware that the real reason of the problem may be a wrong
> architecture, but I still have the feeling that my solution does have some
> use cases.
>

If you use a sum type, you *always* need to check every case. That is what
you sign up for. If you want to express a commonality that should expressed
in the type [1]. Otherwise if you extend Person with a constructor that has
*no* notion of age then you cannot have a total function from Person ->
Int. You would want something like a Prism or just a simple function from
Person -> Maybe Int. Try to avoid non-total functions. That way lies
madness.

[1] as has already been suggested, this involves factoring out the things
that are common from the things that aren't

data SomeSum = Part1 String | Part2 Int | Part3
data Common a = Common Int a
data Composite = Common SomeSum

Now you can see that a function wanting the common Int must necessarily
succeed when applied to Composite, but that there is no total function
Composite -> String that accesses the String value held by Part1. I hope
this is useful to you.
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