[Haskell-cafe] Re: Foralls in records

Matthew Brecknell haskell at brecknell.org
Wed Mar 14 23:35:24 EDT 2007


Adde:
> Thanks, using pattern matching to avoid mentioning the type didn't even
> cross 
> my mind. 
> You are correct in assuming that I thought I could get away 
> with "getConnection :: Connection c => Transaction c". To be honest, I
> still 
> don't understand why it's too polymorphic. To me it says that it'll
> return a 
> Transaction parameterised by a type confirming to the Connection
> interface, 
> even though the concrete type is long lost.

That's not quite right. Replace "a type" with "any type" in that
statement, and you'll be closer to the truth. There is an implicit
"forall" (which can also be read as "for any") in front of any type with
a free type variable, so you actually have:

getConnection :: forall c. Connection c => Transaction c

Universally ("forall")-quantified type variables are resolved through
unification with the context (in this case, by the caller of
getConnection).

If we had an "exists" quantifier, then you might be able to read an
existentially-quantified type variable as a placeholder for some type
that you know exists, but where you don't know the concrete type. This
seems to be the way you are reading the type you want to give to
getConnection.

If you still don't see the difference between universal and
existstential quantification, try substituting "any type the caller
wants" in place of "a type" in your statement about the type. Of course,
we can't give the caller any type it wants, even if the caller is
limited to types conforming to the Connection class. We would only be
able to give it the concrete type that was originally wrapped in the
TransactionT, except for the fact we've forgotten what that type is.

Since we don't have an "exists" quantifier, there is a common
transformation used to convert to "forall" quantification. Martin
demonstrated the transformation with his "withConnection". What Martin
didn't mention is that "withConnection" is rank-2 polymorphic, and that
can be a whole world of fun of its own. :-)



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