Superclass Cycle via Associated Type

[Gábor Lehel]

2011/7/25 Edward Kmett <ekmett at gmail.com>:
> 2011/7/25 Gábor Lehel <illissius at gmail.com>
>>
>> > type family Frozen t
>> > type family Thawed t
>> > class Immutable (Frozen t) => Mutable t where
>> >   thawedFrozen :: t -> Thawed (Frozen t)
>> >   unthawedFrozen :: Thawed (Frozen t) -> t
>> >
>> > class Mutable (Thawed t) => Immutable t where
>> >   frozenThawed :: t -> Frozen (Thawed t)
>> >   unfrozenThawed :: Frozen (Thawed t) -> t
>> >
>> > would enable you to explicitly program with the two isomorphisms, while
>> > avoiding superclass constraints.
>>
>> Hmm, that's an interesting thought. If I'm guesstimating correctly,
>> defining instances would be more cumbersome than with the MPTC method,
>> but using them would be nicer, provided I write helper functions to
>> hide the use of the isomorphism witnesses. I'll give it a try. Thanks!
>>
>> I seem to recall that in one of your packages, you had a typeclass
>> method returning a GADT wrapping the evidence for the equality of two
>> types, as a workaround for the lack of superclass equality constraints
>> -- what makes you prefer that workaround in one case and this one in
>> another?
>
> In a very early version of representable-tries I used my eq package to
> provide equality witnesses:
> http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/eq/0.3.3/doc/html/Data-Eq-Type.html
> But I've turned in general to using explicit isomorphisms for things like
> http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/representable-tries/2.0/doc/html/Data-Functor-Representable-Trie.html
> because they let me define additional instances that are isomorphic to old
> instances quickly, while an actual equality witness would require me to bang
> out a new representation and all 20+ superclass instances. This enables me
> to write instances for thin newtype wrappers like those in Data.Monoid, etc.
> that I would be forced to just skip in a heavier encoding.

Ah, so it was an earlier version of the same package that I saw? Okay.
I'm aware of the advantages of the explicit isomorphisms, I was just
wondering if maybe the GADT equality witnesses also had some
advantages which caused you to use both in different places - but now
I know that you don't, in fact, use both of them in different places,
but have switched from to the other.

-- 
Work is punishment for failing to procrastinate effectively.