[Haskell-cafe] A very nontrivial parser

[Andrew Coppin]

Jonathan Cast wrote:
> I wouldn't call rank-2 types extremely rare . . .
>   

Well now, my parser is annoyingly clunky to use, but it *works*. 
However, I just found something where it seems to be *impossible* to 
write the necessary code without rank-2 types...


I tried to write this type:

  data Encoder2 = Encoder2 {stage1 :: [Word8] -> x, stage2 :: x -> 
[Word8] -> [Word8]}

However, that doesn't work. All type variables on the right must appear 
on the left:

  data Encoder2 x = Encoder2 {stage1 :: [Word8] -> x, stage2 :: x -> 
[Word8] -> [Word8]}

Now I have a problem. I want to put several of these puppies into a big 
list - and I do *not* want to force the type variable 'x' to be the same 
in all cases! (Although one can easily imagine situations where you 
might want this.) So as of now, my code uses rank-2 types - despite the 
fact that I don't actually know what a rank-2 type *is* yet! o_O This is 
rather troubling...