[Haskell-cafe] Functions with generic return types

[Stephen Hicks]

Hi,

I'm trying to write a small module for conveniently writing functions
that can return any of a finite number of types.  That is, I'd like to
be able to write something like
  foo :: StringOrInt t => String -> IO t
This is pretty easy to do if I hard-code the classes as above, but I
run into difficulties making it more general.  In particular, it's
convenient to use incoherent instances so that I can insert the
polymorphism at whatever level I choose (see the third instance
declaration below, as well as the function foo).  But when I try to
make this work for monads, it fails - that is, my function bar (below)
always prints both "str" and "int" because I can't make it lazy enough
- in order to get even a thunk in the non-monadic type, it seems like
the side effect has to happen (unsafeInterleaveIO + seq would sort of
fix this here, but not generally), whereas the type alone should be
sufficient in selecting which monad needs to be evaluated.

I'm having a hard time explaining this abstractly, but I think the
following concrete code explains pretty clearly what I'm trying to do,
and I would appreciate any comments or suggestions for either a better
way to go about this, or something already written that achieves
something similar?

Thanks,
steve

====

{-# LANGUAGE TypeSynonymInstances, MultiParamTypeClasses,
    FlexibleInstances, FlexibleContexts, IncoherentInstances #-}

class Pick c a where pick :: c -> a

instance Pick (a,b) a where pick = fst
instance Pick (a,b) b where pick = snd

instance Pick (a,b) c => Pick (d -> a, d -> b) (d -> c) where
    pick (a,b) d = pick (a d,b d)

-- This instance definition is broken...
instance (Monad m,Pick (a,b) c) => Pick (m a,m b) (m c) where
    pick (ma,mb) = do { a <- ma; b <- mb; return $ pick (a,b) }

foo :: Pick (String,Int) t => String -> t
foo = pick (id :: String -> String, length :: String -> Int)

toStr :: String -> IO String
toStr s = putStrLn "str" >> return s
toInt :: String -> IO Int
toInt s = putStrLn "int" >> return (length s)

bar :: Pick (String,Int) t => String -> IO t
bar = pick (toStr,toInt)