Fwd: [Haskell-cafe] question on types

[Alberto G. Corona]

As allways, I forgot to forward the message to the list, but the Conor
response makes it irrelevant:


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Alberto G. Corona <agocorona at gmail.com>
Date: 2009/2/18
Subject: Re: [Haskell-cafe] question on types
To: Ryan Ingram <ryani.spam at gmail.com>


> Seriously, I love undecidable instances, but there's gotta be a way to
> make type-level programming less painful.  GHC team: please give us
> type-level integers that don't suck! If I ever have to see S (S (S (S
> Z))) again it's too soon.

I´m starting to read about dependent types and it´s very promising.
Maybe my suggestion makes sense:   is to "compress" recursive types such are
S(S(S(S Z))) into internal compiler representations S <n> Z.
This would type match faster and will generate much more clear and
compact compilation errors.