More liberal than liberal type synonyms
Dan Doel
dan.doel at gmail.com
Tue Dec 6 19:59:38 CET 2011
Greetings,
In the process of working on a Haskell-alike language recently, Ed
Kmett and I realized that we had (without really thinking about it)
implemented type synonyms that are a bit more liberal than GHC's. With
LiberalTypeSynonyms enabled, GHC allows:
type Foo a b = b -> a
type Bar f = f String Int
baz :: Bar Foo
baz = show
because Bar expands to saturate Foo. However, we had also implemented
the following, which fails in GHC:
type Foo a b = b -> a
type Bar f = f (Foo Int) (Foo Int)
type Baz f g = f Int -> g Int
quux :: Bar Baz
quux = id
That is: type synonyms are allowed to be partially applied within
other type synonyms, as long as similar transitive saturation
guarantees are met during their use.
I don't know how useful it is, but I was curious if anyone can see
anything wrong with allowing this (it seems okay to me after a little
thought), and thought I'd float the idea out to the GHC developers, in
case they're interested in picking it up.
-- Dan
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