[Haskell-cafe] List as input

[Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH]

On 2008 Oct 16, at 22:22, leledumbo wrote:
>> ...  If there isn't enough information to set a concrete type at  
>> the call,
> type inference fails. This is what you get with strong typing.
>
> In my case, where does type inference fail? Strong typing is good,  
> but quite
> confusing when combined with polymorphism.

Consider the types of "show" and "read":

	show :: Show a => a -> String -- you could use any variable names but
	read :: Read b => String -> b -- I'm doing it this way to make a point

and therefore the type of (read . show) is

	(read . show) :: (Show a, Read b) => a -> b -- a cannot be unified  
with b!

It has no clue that (read . show) are effectively inverses, nor can  
it; you can't describe that with Show and Read.

It would be possible to combine the Show and Read classes into a  
single class which allowed this to work.  What you lose is  
flexibility:  it is possible to define Show for types which cannot be  
read.  Consider, for example, functions:  the Typeable class can be  
used to show a function in terms of its types (as long as it isn't  
polymorphic), but that's useless to read back in.  And outputting a  
function such that it could be read back in would require either  
disassembler+assembler or a virtual machine runtime like the JVM  
or .NET/Mono.

-- 
brandon s. allbery [solaris,freebsd,perl,pugs,haskell] allbery at kf8nh.com
system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] allbery at ece.cmu.edu
electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university    KF8NH