Contexts differ in length

[Iavor Diatchki]

Hi,
I am surprised that GHC performs these checks when started with glasgow-exts.
Your example works with Hugs, but your are probably aware of this.  
Just to support your case, I have also run into this problem,
but I still use hugs for prototyping so I didn't even notice that GHC
is so strict.

To me this seems like a bug in the Haskell spec, and it is ironic that
an implementor has to work harder (i.e. perform this extra check) to
impose unneccessary restrictions on the programmer :-)

-Iavor

On 5/24/05, Robert van Herk <rherk at cs.uu.nl> wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> A while ago I sent an email to the glasgow haskell users maillinglist to
> explain how the "Contexts differ in length" feature (or bug :-))
> restricted me in writing a haskell application. I was hoping for a
> reply, however I didn't receive one (yet).
> 
> Therefore, I will explain the problem again:
> 
> I am writing (for my master's thesis project) a webdevelopment framework
> in Haskell, with features somewhat comparable to Apple's WebObjects.
> Amongst others, session state and database interaction is transparent, etc.
> 
> In my framework, functions that generate HTML are called WFComponents.
> These functions are monadic since they can generate IO (because they may
> do database interaction etc). Also, components can generate links to
> other components. However, since component a may generate a link to
> component b (so that when the user clicks that link component b will be
> evaluated) and component b may link to component a, there will occur
> errors when I try to do this, since the contexts of component a and b
> may not be the same. A minimal example of this will be something like:
> 
> {-# OPTIONS -fglasgow-exts #-}
> 
> module Main where
> import Data.IORef
> 
> class MyReader r v | r -> v where
>   myRead :: r -> IO v
> 
> data R v = R (IORef v)
> instance MyReader (R v) v where
>   myRead (R v) =
>     do v <- readIORef v
>        return v
> 
> 
> a :: IO ()
> a =
>   do r <- createReader
>      b r
> 
> b :: MyReader r Int => r -> IO ()
> b r =
>   do i <- myRead r
>      if i > 10
>        then a
>        else putStrLn (show i)
> 
> createReader :: IO (R Int)
> createReader =
>   do ref <- newIORef 0
>      return (R ref)
> 
> 
> 
> A real example will be a bit more complicated, but this is basically
> what I need to do and currently am not able to. Of course, when needed,
> I can show you the real example. Somewhere in the history of this
> mailling list I read that people have had this program before, but only
> in toy programs. However, I am experincing this problem currently in
> something that is not a toy program. Therefore, my question is if it
> would be possible to lift this constraint on the language, and also, if
> the developers of GHC are currently planning to do this...
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Robert
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