[Haskell-cafe] Is there a way to find out the type inferred for a local function inside another function? :)

[Evan Laforge]

On Fri, Apr 8, 2011 at 5:24 AM, Henning Thielemann
<schlepptop at henning-thielemann.de> wrote:
> Magnus Therning schrieb:
>> AFAIK there is no way to do that, thouhg scion[1] may offer it.
>>
>> Personally I develop more complex local functions at the top-level,
>> and once I'm happy with it I perform some re-factoring and move it in.
>
> I would not write large local functions at all. I would leave them
> top-level but do not export them. This also allows to test them from GHCi.

Agreed, I do this as well.  However, I occasionally would like to do a
"reverse infer", for example:

bigFunction = ... helper x y z

helper = undefined

Now I want to find out what type 'helper' should be in order that it
typecheck within bigFunction.  Obviously 'undefined's type 'a'
trivially satisfies that, so it can't be the most general possible
type because that's always just 'a'.

Currently what I do is declare a signature for helper, and then if it
gets a type error try to figure out how to fix it.  It's usually not
very hard, but it would be slick to have the signature filled in
automatically.