expanding type synonyms in error messages

[Richard Eisenberg]

GHC tries hard to preserve type synonyms where possible, but of course, it can't preserve all of them. The general rule it tries to follow is: preserve vanilla type synonyms; expand type families. This is true both in expected types and actual types. 
If you have a case where you believe that GHC could preserve a type synonym in an expected type, submit a bug report. (Note that constraint synonyms are particularly hard to preserve!)

It would be very easy to report both the synonym-preserving form and the expanded form in an error report, at the cost of making error reports even more verbose. You're welcome to submit a feature request, and this would likely make a good first patch to GHC if you want to get your hands dirty. I'd personally prefer the feature to be protected behind a flag (to avoid seeing that `String` expands to `[Char]` everywhere, for example), but others may feel differently here.

Richard

On Jun 16, 2015, at 11:20 AM, Ömer Sinan Ağacan <omeragacan at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> While working with complex types with lots of arguments etc. errors are
> becoming annoying very fast. For example, GHC prints errors in this way:
> 
>    Expected type: <type without any synonyms>
>      Actual type: <type with synonyms>
> 
> Now I have to expand that synonym in my head to understand the error.
> 
> I was wondering if implementing something like this is possible:
> 
> In type error messages, GHC also prints types that are cleaned from type
> synonyms. Maybe something like this:
> 
>         Expected type: <type1>
>    (without synonyms): <type1, synonyms are expanded>
>           Actual type: <type2>
>    (without synonyms): <type2, synonyms are expanded>
> 
> If this is not always desirable for some reason, we can hide this behavior
> behind a flag.
> 
> What do GHC devs think about this? Is this, in theory, possible to do? How hard
> would it be to implement this?
> 
> Thanks.
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