[Haskell-cafe] Transparent identity instances

[wren ng thornton]

On 11/28/10 9:59 AM, Jafet wrote:
> But GHC does not accept type synonym instances unless they are fully applied.

That's precisely the problem, and why a newtype is used. More than GHC 
implementation details, there's the deeper problem that allowing general 
type-level functions causes decidability problems in type 
checking/inference. Using a newtype with its explicit wrapping and 
unwrapping solves the problem of inference by, essentially, adding type 
annotations. Similar tricks are involved in making recursive types work.

-- 
Live well,
~wren