[Haskell-cafe] Inheritance and Wrappers
Brandon Moore
brandon_m_moore at yahoo.com
Thu Feb 3 03:35:27 CET 2011
>OK, what about this as a use case then. I want to create a type class 'Term'
>with only one function in it. The function returns a 'termTag' which labels the
>"kind" of a value in a DSL.
>
>class Term a where
> termTag :: a -> String
>
>
>A user of this type-class can happily provide an instance without any other type
>
>class requirement. However, I want those types which are instances of Data to be
>
>an instance of Term automatically. On top of that, I don't want to stop the user
>
>from creating a special instance for their data type.
>
>I want to be able to write the following instance to accomplish that:
>
>instance Data t => Term t where
> termTag = show . toConstr
A much more predictable option is to provide this default implementation
as a function
termTagData :: (Data t) => (t -> String)
and let the library clients use it in their instances if the behavior is fine:
instance Term MyT where
termTag = termTagData
>And if the user wants to write a more specific instance, they should be welcome
>to do so:
>
>instance Term UserDT where
> termTag (...) = ...
>
>I am not very much interested in the technical details about how things
>currently are, I am more interested in a discussion about why (if?) this would
>be considered a design flaw?
Here's one thing to consider:
Can you write a function
f :: (Data a) => a -> String
f x = termTag x
It would seem the Data a => Term a instance justifies
this function, and it will always use the default instance.
Now, what happens if "f" is applied to a value of some type
T which is an instance of Data, but has a custom Term instance?
Brandon.
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