[Haskell-cafe] Strong duck typing / structural subtyping / type class aliases / ??? in Haskell

[Casey Hawthorne]

On Fri, 25 Sep 2009 23:25:21 +0200, you wrote:

>On Fri, Sep 25, 2009 at 8:14 PM, Job Vranish <jvranish at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Supposedly OCaml has an OO feature that does this but I haven't tried it
>> out.
>>
>
>Indeed, OCaml has stuctural polymorphism, it's a wonderful feature.
>
>*# let f myobj = myobj#foo "Hi !";;
>val f : < foo : string -> 'a; .. > -> 'a = <fun>*
>
>IIRC, there has been work on Template Haskell for structural polymorphism.

Structural subtyping/polymorphism:

Pros:
- an object can be coerced to any compatible type, the types do not
have to be specified ahead of time, that is at compile time.

Cons:
- may be overly permissive; some coercions might not make sense
semantically.

I wonder how Haskell will minimize the cons, since it is strongly
typed.

--
Regards,
Casey