Newtype wrappers

[Gershom Bazerman]

On 1/14/13 2:42 PM, Johan Tibell wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 14, 2013 at 11:14 AM, Andrea Vezzosi <sanzhiyan at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Have you considered the effect on types like Data.Set that use the
>> uniqueness of typeclass instances to maintain invariants? e.g. even when we
>> have "newtype X = X Y" coercing "Set X" to "Set Y" can produce a tree with
>> the wrong shape for the Ord instance of Y.
> I was just going to say that. Changing newtypes changes instances,
> which isn't safe in the general case.
>

Perhaps it would be useful for data structures that need to remain 
opaque/abstract to be allowed to declare such explicitly, either with 
special syntax, or a distinguished pragma?

Also, I'm fond of Roman's "coerce" proposal, because I can imagine cases 
where explicit declaration of wrap/unwrap functions might not 
necessarily make sense. My understanding of the "lens" library, for 
example, is that it builds up chains of coercions compositionally. In 
such a case, even if we've eliminated the eta issue for a *single* 
coercion, we'd still have it across a chain of them? Meanwhile, a single 
"coerce" whose semantics were like unsafeCoerce (but only when it's 
safe!) would do the job just fine at any level.

That said, I think the general direction of this proposal is great, and 
I hope we can work out the kinks and get it implemented.

--Gershom