[Haskell-cafe] Re: The Proliferation of List-Like Types

[David Roundy]

On Wed, Feb 20, 2008 at 11:18:51PM +0100, Ben Franksen wrote:
> John Goerzen wrote:
> 
> > On 2008-02-20, Jules Bean <jules at jellybean.co.uk> wrote:
> >> Not directly, no.
> >>
> >> The point about Foldable, Functor, and Monad, is that they enforce the
> >> connection between container and contents. If the contents is of type
> >> "a", the container is of type "f a" for a fixed type constructor 'f'.
> >> This works for [], Seq, and so on, but fails for ByteString.
> > 
> > Right.  In a pure abstract sense, we humans know there is a
> > relationship between container and contents: a ByteString always
> > contains a Word8 (or a Char8 if we choose the alternative
> > implementation).
> > 
> > But that is not expressed in the type of ByteString.
> 
> Hm, making a function out of a constant is easy on the value level, just use
> (const x) instead of (x). So, what about wrapping ByteString in a GADT,
> like this
> 
>   data ByteString' a where
>     BS' :: Word8 -> ByteString' Word8
> 
> ? I probably overlooked something important here...

The problem is that while this would change the kind of ByteString to the
same as the kind expected by Functor, you still couldn't define a proper
Functor instance, since only ByteString' Word8 can ever actually be
created.  i.e. how could you implement

fmapBS :: (a -> b) -> ByteString' a -> ByteString' b
-- 
David Roundy
Department of Physics
Oregon State University