Back to explicit Coercible instances?

[Joachim Breitner]

Hi,

Am Samstag, den 12.10.2013, 12:12 +0000 schrieb Simon Peyton-Jones:
> The exact rules you suggest for when "deriving(Coercible)" would be
> allowed, are the rules we can use for when we need a "from thin air"
> instance.

right! The important difference is that with deriving, only the the type
author can use the features, and can decide whether he wants to allow it
for his data type or not.

> Moreover, I'm very keen to give a simple, precise answer to the question
> 	if s is coercible to t
> 	when is (T s) coercible to (T t)
> I propose that the answer is given by precisely T's roles.  At the
> moment I don't see why we would want to do anything more complicated.

I’m not sure if „... if the roles allow it“ is any simpler than „if
there is a Coercible instance for it“, and Haskell programmers might be
happier if they can think in terms of type class instances without
learning a new concept.

But you are right: This thread doesn’t really add any thing new;
it would just be an alternative way to specify coercability (explicit
instances instead of role annotation), which is a bit more familiar to
the programmer, possible more flexible (e.g. some library author could
make the instance conditional by adding some fancy type-class-hackery
constraints), possibly less flexible (no way to talk about coercing 
types that involve class class constraints).


Greetings,
Joachim


-- 
Joachim “nomeata” Breitner
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