Type families difference between 7.0.4 and 7.2.1

[Brandon Allbery]

(I'm adding glasgow-haskell-users to this; if I'm remembering incorrectly
someone should correct me, if not then the namespace bit should be at least
mentioned if not filed as a bug.)

On Tue, Aug 16, 2011 at 00:44, Luite Stegeman <stegeman at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Aug 16, 2011 at 6:33 AM, Brandon Allbery <allbery.b at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > On Mon, Aug 15, 2011 at 08:12, Luite Stegeman <stegeman at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >> -- C.hs
> >> {-# LANGUAGE TypeFamilies #-}
> >> module C where
> >>
> >> class C1 a where
> >>  data F a :: *
> >
> > I believe this is supposed to be syntactic sugar for a data family, so
> 7.0.4
> > is wrong.  (I also think it was a known deficiency.)
>
> In that case, why does module B export F, even though I imported C
> qualified. Within B it can only be referred to as C.F
>

My specific recollection is that 7.0.x treated F as a data family without
calling it one, which introduced some needless duplication in the code base
and some oddities in usage, including possible core dumps for orphan
instances.  Again, 7.2.x is the correct reference; behavior of "class ...
where data ..." in 7.0 is not consistent.

And yes, not exporting the data-family-not-called-such was one of the
inconsistencies in 7.0, 7.2's behavior being considered a bug fix for it.
 7.0's behavior is actually a fairly serious bug, IIRC:  instances of C1 not
defined within C.hs would not correctly associate with the non-exported data
family F and the code generated for them would crash at runtime.
 (Typeclasses are always global over an entire program; in effect, they are
always exported, and you can't suppress it.  Therefore a data family
associated with a typeclass must also be exported always.)

I suspect "Within B it can only be referred to as C.F" is a namespace bug,
given that F must always be implicitly exported/imported to match the
implicit export/import of C1.

-- 
brandon s allbery                                      allbery.b at gmail.com
wandering unix systems administrator (available)     (412) 475-9364 vm/sms
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