[Haskell-cafe] representing Haskell objects in a uniform way

[Gregory Crosswhite]

The problem lies in the definition of your class:

> class AFun f where
>  afun :: Data a => f -> ([Dynamic] -> a)

You are saying that afun can return any type "a" that the user wants  
as long as it is an instance of "Data", whereas here

> instance Data v => AFun v where
> afun f [] = f
> afun _ _  = error "Too many arguments"

you are restricting the type returned by afun.

What you probably want is a class that looks more like

class Data r => AFun f r where
	afun :: f -> ([Dynamic] -> r)

so that the return type is explicitly included in the definition of  
the type.

Also, you might consider requiring that the argument and result be  
instances of Binary rather than Data, since this gives you fast binary  
serialization for free.  Then you could write a class like

class (Binary a, Binary b) => AFun a b where
	afun :: f -> (a -> b)

And your code can take care of the serialization/deserialization and  
then just hand the values of the correct type over to afun.

Cheers,
Greg