[Haskell-cafe] Re: more thoughts on "Finally tagless"

oleg at okmij.org oleg at okmij.org
Tue Mar 9 03:52:27 EST 2010


Stephen Tetley wrote:
> The finally tagless style is an implementation of the TypeCase pattern
> (Bruno C. d. S. Oliveira and Jeremy Gibbons):
>
> http://www.comlab.ox.ac.uk/jeremy.gibbons/publications/typecase.pdf 

The finally tagless style is slightly more general.

The TypeCase paper emphasizes that TypeCase is a pattern to define a
_closed_ type-indexed function -- the indexed family is fixed but the
collection of functions is extensible. This is in contrast to type
classes, where the collection of functions is fixed (by the class
declaration) but the indexed family is extensible (more type class
instances can be defined at any time).

The tagless final approach permits the definition of an extensible
family of open type-indexed functions. For example, we can define a
`data type' of expressions and extend it at any time with more
expression forms *and* more processing functions (e.g., a new way to
print or compile an expression).  With the tagless final approach, we
have the extensibility in both dimensions.

I'll be talking about this extensibility at some length in two weeks,
at the Spring School on Generic and Indexed Programming.


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