Concrete syntax for open type kind?

[Simon Peyton Jones]

Does anyone remember the justification of not having unlifted or open kinds in the source language?
They aren’t in the source language because they are a gross hack, with many messy consequences. Particularly the necessary sub-kinding, and the impact on inference.  I’m not proud of it.

But I do have a plan. Namely to use polymorphism.  Currently we have
               kinds    k ::= * | # | ? | k1 -> k2 | ...

Instead I propose
               kinds   k ::= TYPE bx  | k1 -> k2 | ....
               boxity  bx ::= BOXED | UNBOXED | bv
where bv is a boxity variable

So

·        * = TYPE BOXED

·        # = TYPE UNBOXED

·        ? = TYPE bv
Now error is polymorphic:
               error :: forall bv. forall (a:TYPE bv). String -> a

And now everything will work out smoothly I think.  And it should be reasonably easy to expose in the source language.

All that said, there’s never enough time to do these things.

Simon

From: Glasgow-haskell-users [mailto:glasgow-haskell-users-bounces at haskell.org] On Behalf Of Conal Elliott
Sent: 16 April 2014 18:01
To: Richard Eisenberg
Cc: glasgow-haskell-users at haskell.org
Subject: Re: Concrete syntax for open type kind?

Oops! I was reading ParserCore.y, instead of Parser.y.pp. Thanks.

Too bad it's not possible to replicate this type interpretation of `error` and `undefined`. I'm doing some Core transformation, and I have a polymorphic function (reify) that I want to apply to expressions of lifted and unlifted types, as a way of structuring the transformation. When my transformation gets to unlifted types, the application violates the *-kindedness of my polymorphic function. I can probably find a way around. Maybe I'll build the kind-incorrect applications and then make sure to transform them away in the end. Currently, the implementation invokes `error`.

Does anyone remember the justification of not having unlifted or open kinds in the source language?
-- Conal

On Tue, Apr 15, 2014 at 5:09 PM, Richard Eisenberg <eir at cis.upenn.edu<mailto:eir at cis.upenn.edu>> wrote:
What version of the GHC code are you looking at? The parser is currently stored in compiler/parser/Parser.y.pp (note the pp) and doesn’t have these lines. As far as I know, there is no way to refer to OpenKind from source.

You’re absolutely right about the type of `undefined`. `undefined` (and `error`) have magical types. GHC knows that GHC.Err defines an `undefined` symbol and gives it its type by fiat. There is no way (I believe) to reproduce this behavior.

If you have -fprint-explicit-foralls and -fprint-explicit-kinds enabled, quantified variables of kind * are not given kinds in the output. So, the lack of a kind annotation tells you that `a`’s kind is *. Any other kind (assuming these flags) would be printed.

I hope this helps!
Richard

On Apr 15, 2014, at 7:39 PM, Conal Elliott <conal at conal.net<mailto:conal at conal.net>> wrote:

I see ‘#’ for unlifted and ‘?’ for open kinds in compiler/parser/Parser.y:

akind   :: { IfaceKind }

        : '*'              { ifaceLiftedTypeKind }

        | '#'              { ifaceUnliftedTypeKind }

        | '?'              { ifaceOpenTypeKind }

        | '(' kind ')'     { $2 }



kind    :: { IfaceKind }

        : akind            { $1 }

        | akind '->' kind  { ifaceArrow $1 $3 }

However, I don’t know how to get GHC to accept ‘#’ or ‘?’ in a kind annotation. Are these kinds really available to source programs.

I see that undefined has an open-kinded type:

*Main> :i undefined

undefined :: forall (a :: OpenKind). a      -- Defined in ‘GHC.Err’

Looking in the GHC.Err source, I just see the following:

undefined :: a

undefined =  error "Prelude.undefined"

However, if I try similarly,

q :: a

q = error "q"

I don’t see a similar type:

*X> :i q

q :: forall a. a        -- Defined at ../test/X.hs:12:1

I don't know what kind 'a' has here, nor how to find out.
-- Conal
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