[Haskell-cafe] OOP'er with (hopefully) trivial questions.....
Nicholls, Mark
Nicholls.Mark at mtvne.com
Mon Dec 17 07:22:43 EST 2007
Ok...
Thanks I need to revisit data and newtype to work out what the
difference is I think.
-----Original Message-----
From: Jed Brown [mailto:five9a2 at gmail.com] On Behalf Of Jed Brown
Sent: 17 December 2007 12:04
To: Nicholls, Mark
Cc: haskell-cafe at haskell.org
Subject: Re: [Haskell-cafe] OOP'er with (hopefully) trivial
questions.....
On 17 Dec 2007, Nicholls.Mark at mtvne.com wrote:
> Ooo
>
> "The constructor of a newtype must have exactly one field but `R' has
> two In the newtype declaration for `Rectangle'"
>
> It doesn't like
>
> "newtype Rectangle = R Int Int"
You want
data Rectangle = R Int Int
A newtype declaration will be completely erased at compile time. That
is, when you have a declaration like
newtype Circle = C Int
the compiled code will not be able to distinguish between a Circle and
an Int. You do, however, get all the benefits of a separate entity in
the type system. When your type only has one constructor, newtype is
preferred over data, but they are semantically equivalent. There are
extensions which provide impressive newtype-deriving-foo (getting the
compiler to write fairly non-trivial instance declarations for you).
Jed
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