Coercible class (Was: newtype wrappers)

[Richard Eisenberg]

Because, from a user's point of view, defining 

> newtype Age = MkAge Int

automatically creates Coercible instances

> instance Coercible Age Int
> instance Coercible Int Age

and defining datatypes also creates instances. This looks like a user-visible language feature to me, and I think it should be documented in the manual.

unsafeCoerce, rightly, need not be, because it's just a perfectly ordinary function with a rather extraordinary type.

Richard

On Sep 15, 2013, at 5:00 PM, Roman Cheplyaka <roma at ro-che.info> wrote:

> Could you explain why you think it's a language feature? We have plenty
> of "magic" stuff like unsafePerformIO, unsafeCoerce, or StableNames,
> which are not documented in the manual.
> 
> Just curious.
> 
> Roman
> 
> * Richard Eisenberg <eir at cis.upenn.edu> [2013-09-15 16:48:16-0400]
>> Very cool!
>> 
>> In the feature as pushed, is it possible to use coerce on any old newtype? If so, then it really is a language feature and probably should go into the manual, if `coerce` is exposed.
>> 
>> What was the end result of the discussion on abstraction? Can a library control how its types are coerced?
>> 
>> Richard
>> 
>> On Sep 13, 2013, at 6:13 PM, Joachim Breitner <mail at joachim-breitner.de> wrote:
>> 
>>> Hi,
>>> 
>>> Am Montag, den 09.09.2013, 11:26 -0500 schrieb Austin Seipp:
>>>> It sounds like Simon thinks your work is good to go, so when your tree
>>>> is clean, feel free to push.
>>> 
>>> done!
>>> 
>>> Given that in the final form the feature, to the user, looks like a
>>> library and not a language extension, I decided to put the documentation
>>> not in the users guide, but only in the haddock for coerce and
>>> Coercible.
>>> 
>>> So far they only live in GHC.Prim. Should we expose them in GHC.Prim for
>>> 7.8, or only in 7.10?
>>> 
>>> Greetings,
>>> Joachim
>>> 
>>> -- 
>>> Joachim “nomeata” Breitner
>>> mail at joachim-breitner.de • http://www.joachim-breitner.de/
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