[Haskell-cafe] Show instances for error messages (Was: Refactoring status)

[Emil Axelsson]

I think partial type signatures

   http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/haskell-prime/wiki/PartialTypeAnnotations

would allow that kind of "tunneling". Is there any ongoing work on that?

/ Emil



Henning Thielemann skrev:
> On Mon, 7 Jan 2008, Emil Axelsson wrote:
> 
>> One approach to programming in Haskell, which I use all the time, is to write
>> the type signature before the function body. This means that if I'm trying to do
>> something strange, I will often be warned by the type checker even before I've
>> written the strange code.
>>
>> But I've also been bitten by the problem of having to change a lot of type
>> signatures just because I want to e.g. show an overloaded variable.
> 
> ... which is especially annoying if you need the Show instance for an
> 'error'.  Since 'error' denotes a programming error it should never be
> evaluated and thus the Show instance is only for cases which must not
> happen. Paradoxical. It would be interesting if it is possible to tunnel
> Show class dictionaries through to an 'error' like IO is tunneled to
> 'trace'.
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