equality relations: user-facing pretty-printing question

Iavor Diatchki iavor.diatchki at gmail.com
Mon Jan 18 17:52:36 UTC 2016


Hello,

What's the difference between `~~` and `~#` (I assume `~#` is
heterogeneous)?

As for the rest, as far as I understand, `~` is a strict subset of `~~` in
the sense that:
  1. if `a ~ b`, then `a ~~ b`
  2. if `not (a ~ b)`, then `not (a ~~ b)`
  3. if `a ~ b` is a kind error (i.e., the kind of `a` is known to be
different from the kind of `b`), then `not (a ~~ b)`

So, perhaps it makes sense to have a "smart" pretty printer for `a ~ b`:

  if kindOf a == kindOf b then `a ~ b` else `a ~~ b`

-Iavor







On Mon, Jan 18, 2016 at 9:24 AM, Ryan Scott <ryan.gl.scott at gmail.com> wrote:

> In my ideal world, GHC would remember as much as what the user wrote
> as possible in printing error messages. So if the user writes:
>
>     f :: Int ~ Char => ...
>
> Then GHC would remember that the context was written with a single
> tilde, and print out Int ~ Char in the error message explicitly
> wherever the full type signature of f is printed.
>
> What it sounds like, though, is that deep in the guts of the type
> inferencer, there's a chance that single-tilde equality might turn
> into double-tilde or tilde-hash equality at some point. In those
> cases, printing out the particular brand of tilde might get confusing.
> In such cases, we might compromise and print out something neutral
> like "is equal to". I suppose this would always be the case if you
> didn't explicitly write a ~ b and had to infer it.
>
> I'm not sure about the technical details of this though, i.e., if GHC
> actually remembers a ~ b all the way through the
> typechecking/inferencing pipeline.
>
> Ryan S.
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