Exposing newtype coercions to Haskell

[Joachim Breitner]

Hi,

Am Dienstag, den 02.07.2013, 14:11 +0000 schrieb Simon Peyton-Jones:
> I'm not sure that a plugin is the way to go here, though it's a good
> start.  

as I said, it is just to host the prototype that allows for quick
experimentation and allows people to test it without having to compile
GHC.

> ·       I’m not sure how you expect to deal with essential NT
> arguments:
> 
> newtype T a = MkT a a
> 
> tNT :: NT a b -> NT (T a) (T b)
> 
> tNT n = createNT ???

I planned to use
        tNT = error "magic message to GHC.NT.Plugin"
that is then replaced by GHC.NT.Plugin (and if for some reason it is
missed by it it stays type safe)


> To your questions:
> 
> ·       To do these kind of things, CoreM will need more reader stuff.
> In particular:
> 
> o  The global TypeEnv
> o  The GlobalRdrEnv

Ok, I guess this means that I’ll need to leave the easy land of Plugin
experimentation very soon...


I also noticed a problem with my logic for creating the NT-lifting
function: Just having the constructors of C in scope is not sufficient
to safely provide
        NT a b -> NT (C a) (C b)
as the parameters of the constructor might wrap a in another type
constructor, i.e.

        data Foo a = Foo (Set a)

then we certainly don’t want the user to be able to write
        
        deriving fooNT :: NT a b -> NT (Foo a) (Foo b)
        
as he can easily get the unwanted (Set a) -> (Set b) coercion for
arbitrary a b from that. So in this example, the compiler should at most
accept

        deriving fooNT :: NT (Set a) (Set b) -> NT (Foo a) (Foo b)

but it feels a bit weird that the „internals“ of Foo are relevant here.
Following this line of thought it means that for

        data Proxy a = Proxy

we would allow

        deriving proxyNT :: NT (Proxy a) (Proxy b)

without a "NT a b" parameter, as long as the Proxy data constructor is
in scope. 


Greetings,
Joachim
-- 
Joachim Breitner
  e-Mail: mail at joachim-breitner.de
  Homepage: http://www.joachim-breitner.de
  ICQ#: 74513189
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