[Haskell-cafe] Got problems with classes

[Job Vranish]

I'm not exactly sure what you're trying to do, but the problem is that
you're trying to return a specific value where the type signature is
polymorphic.

getParticleI returns a p, (with the constraint that  p is a type in the
class Particle)
This means that getParticleI can be called in any context that needs a
Particle p, but your getParticleI returns (Double, Double, Double) so it
would only work in a context that needed a (Double, Double, Double), and the
type signature doesn't reflect that, so you get an error.

To emphasize the problem, say I make a ParticleD
type ParticleD  =  (Int, Int)
instance Particle ParticleD

let (a, b) = getParticleI myConfig 5 -- this is perfectly valid since
ParticleD is a Particle, but doesn't work with your getParticleI definition
because it returns a specific type (Double, Double, Double).
Do you see what I mean?

You can fix it by either fixing the type of getParticleI:
getParticleI :: c -> Int -> ParticleC

or by using multiparameter type classes

class Configuration c p where
   getParticleI :: (Particle p) => c -> Int -> p

depending on what you're actually trying to do.

- Job


On Mon, Aug 17, 2009 at 2:35 AM, Grigory Sarnitskiy <sargrigory at ya.ru>wrote:

> Hello! I can't understand why the following dummy example doesn't work.
>
> {-# OPTIONS -XTypeSynonymInstances #-}
> {-# OPTIONS -XFlexibleInstances #-}
> module Main where
> import Data.Array.Unboxed
>
> class Particle p
>
> type ParticleC  =  (Double, Double, Double)
> instance Particle ParticleC
>
> class Configuration c where
>    getParticleI :: (Particle p) => c -> Int -> p
>
> type Collection p = UArray (Int,Int) Double
> instance Configuration (Collection p) where
>    getParticleI config i = (1,1,1) :: ParticleC
> _______________________________________________
> Haskell-Cafe mailing list
> Haskell-Cafe at haskell.org
> http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/attachments/20090817/b7c80cab/attachment.html