GADTs in the wild

[Felipe Almeida Lessa]

On Wed, Aug 15, 2012 at 12:54 PM, Christian Maeder
<Christian.Maeder at dfki.de> wrote:
> Well, "Either" was an adhoc choice and should be application specific.
> Another h98 solution would be to keep the common part in a single
> constructor:
>
>   data UserOrAppData = AppData | UserData UserId UTCTime
>   data AccessToken = AccessToken UserOrAppData AccessTokenData

This is a non-solution since you can't specify anymore that you want
an user access token but not an app access token.

> or: data AccessToken a = AccessToken a AccessTokenData

And this one brings us the Either again (although on fewer places).
Most functions would be able to get a `AccessToken a` because they
don't care about what you called `UserData` above.  However, some
other functions (such as isValid) do care about that and would need
`Either (AccessToken AppData) (AccessToken UserData)`.

That's not to say that we *couldn't* avoid GADTs.  We certainly could.
 But GADTs allow us to have our cake and eat it, too =).

Cheers,

-- 
Felipe.