Newtype wrappers

[wren ng thornton]

On 1/14/13 1:09 PM, Simon Peyton-Jones wrote:
> Friends
>
> I'd like to propose a way to "promote" newtypes over their enclosing type.  Here's the writeup
>            http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/NewtypeWrappers
>
> Any comments?  Below is the problem statement, taken from the above page.
>
> I'd appreciate
>
> *         A sense of whether you care. Does this matter?

I care. So far I've gotten around some of the problems by defining 
rewrite rules which take (fmap NT), (fmap unNT), etc into unsafeCoerce. 
I haven't run into the eta problems that I'm aware of, but the 
non-constant-time maps are something that shows up quite a lot.

I'd prefer the second approach since it's cleaner to programmers: No new 
syntax; no namespace pollution. The one problem I could see is that 
there's no way to restrict export of the NTC instance, which may be 
necessary for correctness when the constructors aren't exported due to 
invariants...

> *         Improvements to the design I propose

I'd suggest the name newtypeCoerce (to match unsafeCoerce) rather than 
newtypeCast. The "casting" terminology isn't terribly common in Haskell 
(I don't think).

-- 
Live well,
~wren