[Haskell-cafe] How to define Show [MyType] ?

Wouter Swierstra wss at Cs.Nott.AC.UK
Tue Dec 9 04:36:28 EST 2008


> The biggest wart is that "view" is not a total function; the compiler
> needs to be extra careful to only call it on types that are instances
> of "View".  I wonder if there is a good way to solve this problem?

The usual way to solve this is to define a data type corresponding to  
all the types in your class. For example:

data Data a where
   | CHAR : Data Char
   | STRING : Data String
   | LIST : Data a -> Data [a]
   ...

With this representation you no longer need typecase (which is  
horrendous semantic hack) and your dispatch function can be made  
total. Hope this helps,

   Wouter



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