[Haskell-cafe] Proposal: deriving ShallowEq?

[Ben Lippmeier]

Ralf Lammel wrote:
> As Bulat points out, the GHC primitive dataToTag#
> indeed nicely solves the problem. Ben, just for
> completeness' sake; with SYB, you get such reflective
> information too (and others):
> 
> shallowEq :: Data a => a -> a -> Bool
> shallowEq x y = toConstr x == toConstr y
> 
> (dataToTag# returns Int, while toConstr comprises other things like the
> constructor name.)
> 

Ralf,
Yes, I ended up using the "propper" SYB approach instead, though I have 
noticed that the reflection data types Constr and DataRep make no 
mention of type variables or functions.

For example, this works fine:
 > getTag (Just 5)           ==# getTag (Just{})
 > getTag (Just (\x -> x))   ==# getTag (Just{})

But this does not
 > toConstr (Just 5)         == toConstr (Just{})
     Ambiguous type variables.

 > toConstr (Just (\x -> x)) == toConstr (Just{})
     No instance for Data (t -> t)

I appreciate the reasons why this is so, though I think it's interesting 
to see the practical consequences.

A toConstr version of shallowEq works ok so long as you provide a type 
signature to constrain both arguments to be the same type, and one of 
them is always fully constructed - which is fine for me at the moment.

Ben.