[Haskell-cafe] GADTs vs arrows/typeclasses

[S. Alexander Jacobson]

I don't think I'm the only one confused here.  Henrik Nilson in his 
paper on adding GADTs to Yampa comments that:

   However, the recent addition of Generalized Algebraic Data
   Types (GADTs) [26] to the list of Haskell extensions supported
   by the Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC) gives programmers a
   lot more freedom. GADTs are a limited form of dependent types,
   offering a considerably enlarged scope for capturing and thus en-
   forcing important code and data invariants statically. In particular,
   GADTs are just what is needed to address the problem discussed
   above since the key idea is to allow constructors that have more spe-
   cific types than usual, and to take that extra type information into
   account in individual case branches. GADTs would no doubt also
   offer an interesting alternative to the methods described by Baars
   and Swierstra [1] and Hughes [19].

[1] and [19] are papers about Arrows.

I guess I'm also not sure what belongs in a GADT and what belongs in a 
typeclass e.g. here is an Arrow GADT

   data Arrow b c where
     Arr::(b->c) -> Arrow b c
     Compose::Arrow b c -> Arrow c d -> Arrow b d
     First::Arrow a b -> Arrow (a,c) (b,c)

When Arrow is defined like this, rather than write instances you just 
various evaluation functions for the Arrow GADT.

-Alex-

______________________________________________________________
S. Alexander Jacobson tel:917-770-6565 http://alexjacobson.com


On Tue, 5 Dec 2006, Neil Mitchell wrote:

> Hi
>
>> It seems like Haskell has two emerging idioms for parsing and fsms:
>> GADTs and Arrows.
>
> What about something else? If you limit yourself to the two things
> that look "new and cool" (where emerging is another word for new, and
> idiom seems to be the current Haskell word for cool), you miss out on
> all the tried and tested stuff.
>
>> I am thinking about using one of these idioms to represent server
>> structure in a future version of HAppS but I'm not sure where to
>> start.  Why would one choose one or the other?
>
> I would pick Arrows (over GADTs) because Arrows are Haskell, and are
> supported by multiple Haskell compilers. Other than that (as far as I
> was aware) these two things are massively different, so I wouldn't
> have thought it was a "one or the other" choice usually.
>
> Thanks
>
> Neil
>