Request for feedback: deriving strategies syntax

[Simon Peyton Jones]

I'm not following all the details here, and I do not feel strongly about syntax; but I do hope that you'll update the wiki page to reflect the discussion.

Thanks

Simon

-----Original Message-----
From: ghc-devs [mailto:ghc-devs-bounces at haskell.org] On Behalf Of Ryan Scott
Sent: 18 July 2016 15:00
To: Richard Eisenberg <eir at cis.upenn.edu>
Cc: Andres Loeh <mail at andres-loeh.de>; GHC developers <ghc-devs at haskell.org>
Subject: Re: Request for feedback: deriving strategies syntax

Andres,

> The objects probably shouldn't be type synonyms, but they could be 
> special datatypes or type families, perhaps.

I considered that - we already have some special datatypes, type families, and type classes currently. However, neither datatypes nor type families are allowed to appear as the outermost type in an instance declaration (unless we bake in a very prominent exception to this rule), and if we imbued type classes with this magic, one might think that "deriving (GND Eq)" means we're deriving an instance for the magical GND class, not Eq. So those approaches don't sound satisfying to me on a cursory examination.

Richard,

> The one idea I can suggest in this space (somewhat tongue-in-cheek, 
> but feel free to take it seriously) is `bespoke`

It might be a tongue-in-cheek suggestion, but I _really_ like it. It captures the intended semantics better than any other previous suggestion, I think. And we're already going to be appropriating a new keyword with "anyclass", so why not take "bespoke" as well? :)

Please stop me if I've slipped into madness here.

> I thought about verbosity here, and it's not clear which one is more verbose. For example, I frequently define a new newtype and then wish to use GND to derive a whole host of instances. In this case (is it common?), `deriving (X, Y) deriving newtype (A,B,C,D,E,F)` is shorter than putting newtype on each class name.

That's a good point. Another thing to consider is that I suspect in 90% of the time, users are only going to be reaching for -XDerivingStrategies in the scenario when they enable both -XGeneralizedNewtypeDeriving and -XDeriveAnyClass. That will happen when they want to derive instances for newtypes, and as you said, you typically derive several instances at a time when defining newtypes.
Therefore, it seems less noisy to factor out the deriving strategy names so that readers can tell at a glance which batch of instances are newtype-derived and which are anyclass-derived, instead of having to read a keyword before every single type.

Plus, on a superficial level, I like keeping the deriving strategy name outside of the parentheses. I think it makes clear that these keywords aren't modifying the type we're deriving, only the means by which we're deriving it. Of course, you may feel differently than I do, so please speak up if you disagree!


Ryan S.
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