[Haskell-cafe] Best idiom for avoiding Defaulting warnings with ghc -Wall -Werror ??

[David Roundy]

On Fri, Jun 22, 2007 at 12:34:09PM -0700, Dave Bayer wrote:
> On Jun 22, 2007, at 11:42 AM, David Roundy wrote:
> 
> >On Fri, Jun 22, 2007 at 11:37:15AM -0700, Dave Bayer wrote:
> >>GHC issues a "Warning: Defaulting the following constraint(s) to type
> >>`Int'" for the definition of z.
> >
> >Why don't you just use -fno-warn-type-defaults?
> ...
> >ghc -Werr -Wall is a often good idea, but if you prefer a different
> >programming style (e.g. no top-level type declarations required),  
> >ghc gives
> >you the flexibility to do that.
> 
> To be precise, I __PREFER__ a "ghc  -Wall -Werror" programming style.  
> In particular, I always want defaulting errors, because sometimes I  
> miss the fact that numbers I can count on my fingers are defaulting  
> to Integer.
> 
> Once I explicitly declare "default (Int)", I want "ghc  -Wall - 
> Werror" to shut up, unless this defaulting rule never gets used.  
> Instead, it complains anyways when the defaulting takes place that  
> I've just declared I know about. In other words, I want warnings  
> involving "default" to follow the same logic currently used for  
> warnings involving "import".

I see, that makes sense.  And I have no idea that would help you.

> This is a bug. I want "ghc  -Wall -Werror" to be a practical choice,  
> left on all the time, and in my example I had to work too hard to  
> avoid the warning. Other people just wouldn't use "ghc  -Wall - 
> Werror", the way some people won't use seat belts, and the way some  
> people view any strongly typed language as a cumbersome seat belt. If  
> we tolerate ridiculously arcane syntax to handle these situations, we  
> fully deserve to be marginalized while Ruby takes over the world.
> 
> In other words, I'm disputing that the top-level declarations are in  
> fact required. GHC can be trivially modified to allow Haskell to  
> handle this situation far more elegantly.

I think of top-level type declarations as type-checked comments, rather
than a seat-belt.  It forces you to communicate to others what a function
does, if that function may be used elsewhere.  I like this.  Although it can
be cumbersome for quick and dirty code, developers trying to read your code
will thank you for it (unless you make *everything* top-level, which is
just poor coding style).

-Wall -Werror isn't a seat belt, it's a coding-style guideline.
-- 
David Roundy
Department of Physics
Oregon State University