[Haskell-cafe] confusion about 'instance'....

[Nicholls, Mark]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Bulat Ziganshin [mailto:bulat.ziganshin at gmail.com]
> Sent: 10 January 2008 13:36
> To: Nicholls, Mark
> Cc: Luke Palmer; haskell-cafe at haskell.org
> Subject: Re[2]: [Haskell-cafe] confusion about 'instance'....
> 
> Hello Mark,
> 
> Thursday, January 10, 2008, 4:25:20 PM, you wrote:
> 
> "instance Num a =>> A a"
> 
> > Mean the same thing as
> 
> > "instance A (forall a.Num a=>a)"
> 
> programmers going from OOP world always forget that classes in Haskell
> doesn't the same as classes in C++. *implementation* of this instance
> require to pass dictionary of Num class along with type. now imagine
> the following code:

My confusion is not between OO classes and Haskell classes, but exactly
are the members of a Haskell type class...I'd naively believed them to
be types (like it says on the packet!)...but now I'm not so sure.

> 
> f :: A a => a -> a
> 
> f cannot use your instance because it doesn't receive Num dictionary
> of type `a`. it is unlike OOP situation where every object carries the
> generic VMT which includes methods for every class/interface that
> object supports
> 
> as usual, i suggest you to study
> http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/OOP_vs_type_classes
> first and especially two papers mentioned in References there

I have done....learning is not an atomic operation....i.e. I can only
believe what I understand...academic papers are especially beyond me at
this point.

I can translate OO into mathematical logic pretty easily, I was trying
to do the same thing (informally of course) with Haskell....but things
are not quite what they appear....not because of some OO hang up (which
I probably have many)...but because of what "type class" actually means.

So you may be right, I think I need to understand more about the
sematics of Haskell...I was hoping to stay (initially) ignorant.

I will try the postscript doc and see if it makes any sense.


> 
> --
> Best regards,
>  Bulat                            mailto:Bulat.Ziganshin at gmail.com