Why is Bag's Data instance "broken"?

[José Pedro Magalhães]

Hi Philip,

On Wed, Aug 29, 2012 at 12:01 PM, Philip Holzenspies
<pkfh at st-andrews.ac.uk>wrote:

> Dear GHCers,
>
> I'm performing traversals over GHC-API results (HsSyn et al). For this
> purpose, I'm using SYB generics.
>
> I found that I couldn't use "ext1Q" for a function with type "Data x =>
> Bag x -> String", i.e. that this function was never applied. The source of
> Bag's instance of the Data class seems to explain why:
>
>
> instance Data a => Data (Bag a) where
>   gfoldl k z b = z listToBag `k` bagToList b -- traverse abstract type
> abstractly
>   toConstr _   = abstractConstr $ "Bag("++show (typeOf (undefined::a))++")"
>   gunfold _ _  = error "gunfold"
>   dataTypeOf _ = mkNoRepType "Bag"
>
>
> Is there a rationale to not allow gunfolds and to keep toConstr abstract?


As far as I understand, this is to keep `Bag` itself abstract, preventing
users from inspecting its internals.


> More to the point for my needs, is there a reason to not allow dataCast1
> casting of Bags?
>

That is a separate issue; I believe this instance is just missing a
`dataCast1 = gcast1` line.
All datatypes of kind `* -> *` should have such a definition.

(Having a look at Data.Data, I guess the same applies to `Ptr a` and
`ForeignPtr a`.
And `Array a b` seems to be missing the `dataCast2` method. I propose
fixing all of these.)


Cheers,
Pedro


>
> Regards,
> Philip
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