[Haskell-cafe] Re: Rank N type tutorial?

[Jón Fairbairn]

"David House" <dmhouse at gmail.com> writes:

> On 27/10/06, Greg Buchholz <haskell at sleepingsquirrel.org> wrote:
> >     I thought "exists" was spelled "forall" in Haskell?
> 
> There is some confusion here,

It's the notation for data declarations that causes the
confusion. To rearrange your text a bit:

> So, for example:
> 
> [forall a. a]  --  the list whose elements all have the type forall a.
> a, i.e. a list of bottom.

list of bottoms.

> forall a. [a]  --  all elements have some (the same) type a, which can
> be assumed to be any type at all by a callee.

and consequently also must be a list of bottoms.


This:

> data T = forall a. MkT a

is where the confusion comes in.

> This means that:
> 
> MkT :: forall a. a -> T

If the standard syntax were

> data T where
>    MkT :: forall a. a -> T

(as for GADTs), there's be less of a problem. (it's still
misleading, because T looks like it has no variables in it,
which might lead one to conclude that MkT throws away its
argument) Equally, the natural way of writing it with the
old syntax would be:

> data T = MkT (exists a. a)

ie a T is the constructor MkT applied to some unknown type.
So people seeing the first form tend to think it means this
last.

-- which is what you said, but I think this highlights the
   source of confusion better.

-- 
Jón Fairbairn                                 Jon.Fairbairn at cl.cam.ac.uk