Injective type families?

[Iavor Diatchki]

Hello,
shouldn't the check go the other way?  (i.e., if the RHSs unify, then the
LHS must be the same).  Here is an example:

-- This function is not injective.
type instance F a = Int
type instance F b = Int

Still, Conal's example would not work if we just added support for injective
type functions because + is not injective (e.g., 2 + 3 = 1 + 4).  Instead,
what we'd need to say is that it is injective in each argument separately,
which would basically amount to adding functional dependencies to type
functions.  Perhaps something like this:

type family (a :+: b) ~ c | c b -> a, c a -> b

This seems like a feature which could be useful.

-Iavor
PS: Conal, I have been working on a GHC extension which has direct support
for working with natural numbers at the type-level (e.g., + is a built-in
type function which supports cancellation and other properties of the normal
+ operation). I am keen on collecting different ways in which people use
type-level naturals to make sure that my implementation supports them (or at
least report a decent error).  I wasn't sure if the :+ from your example was
just meant to illustrate the issue with injectivity, but if you have a use
case for type nats, I'd be curious to find out more.




On Mon, Feb 14, 2011 at 3:26 PM, Simon Peyton-Jones
<simonpj at microsoft.com>wrote:

> Injective type families are a perfectly reasonable idea, but we have not
> implemented them (yet). The idea would be:
>
> * You declare the family to be injective
>
> injective type family T a :: *
>
> * At every type instance, injectivity is checked.  That is, if you say
>
> type instance T (a,Int) = Either a Bool
>
> then we must check that every type instance whose LHS unifies with this has
> the same RHS under the unifying substitution.  Thus
>
> type instance T (a,Bool) = [a]   -- OK; does not unify
> type instance T (Int,b) = Either Int Bool  -- OK; same RHS on (Int,Int)
>
>
> I think it's mainly a question of tiresome design questions (notably do we
> want a new keyword "injective"?  Should it go before "type"?) and hacking to
> get it all implemented.
>
> Simon
>
> |  -----Original Message-----
> |  From: glasgow-haskell-users-bounces at haskell.org [mailto:
> glasgow-haskell-users-
> |  bounces at haskell.org] On Behalf Of Dan Doel
> |  Sent: 14 February 2011 23:14
> |  To: glasgow-haskell-users at haskell.org
> |  Subject: Re: Injective type families?
> |
> |  On Monday 14 February 2011 5:51:55 PM Daniel Peebles wrote:
> |  > I think what you want is closed type families, as do I and many others
> :)
> |  > Unfortunately we don't have those.
> |
> |  Closed type families wouldn't necessarily be injective, either. What he
> wants
> |  is the facility to prove (or assert) to the compiler that a particualr
> type
> |  family is in fact injective.
> |
> |  It's something that I haven't really even seen developed much in fancy
> |  dependently typed languages, though I've seen the idea before. That is:
> prove
> |  things about your program and have the compiler take advantage of it.
> |
> |  -- Dan
> |
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