[Haskell-cafe] Re: type families and type signatures

[Tom Schrijvers]

> However, I have this feeling that
>
>  bar :: forall a . Id a -> String
>
> with a type family  Id  *is* parametric in the sense that no matter what  a 
> is, the result always has to be the same. Intuitively, that's because we may 
> not "pattern match on the branch" of a definition like
>
>  type instance Id String = ..
>  type instance Id Int    = ..
>  ..

But in a degenerate case there could be just this one instance:

 	type instance Id x = GADT x

which then reduces this example to the GADT case of which you said that is 
was "clearly parametric".

Tom
--
Tom Schrijvers

Department of Computer Science
K.U. Leuven
Celestijnenlaan 200A
B-3001 Heverlee
Belgium

tel: +32 16 327544
e-mail: tom.schrijvers at cs.kuleuven.be
url: http://www.cs.kuleuven.be/~toms/