kind of type equalities (was: equality relations: user-facing pretty-printing question)

[Eric Seidel]

This is a bit tangential, but I find it odd that we care about whether a
type equality has kind Lifted or Unlifted. 

As I understand, the Lifted/Unlifted distinction exists so that we know
whether we have a thunk (and by extension a pointer of a constant size)
or the thing itself (the size depends on the type). So Lifted/Unlifted
is primarily important for code-gen and runtime purposes. Type
equalities, on the other hand, shouldn't exist at runtime as the types
are erased.

So why do we care whether a type equality is a thunk? My guess is that
we only care because type equalities *do* exist in Core as proof terms,
so they need to be well-kinded, but this isn't a very satisfying answer.


On Mon, Jan 18, 2016, at 09:55, Richard Eisenberg wrote:
> I like that idea. Do others?
> 
> Yes, agreed about the difference between ~ and ~~.
> 
> ~# is unlifted, and is now the type that the solver works on. ~~ is
> lifted. That's the only difference. But the fact that ~~ is lifted is
> what allows you to put it in a constraint, because all constraints are
> lifted. Users should never bother with ~#, but they might with ~~.
> 
> Richard
> 
> On Jan 18, 2016, at 12:52 PM, Iavor Diatchki <iavor.diatchki at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> 
> > 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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