[Haskell-cafe] Why aren't there anonymous sum types in Haskell?

[Casey McCann]

On Tue, Jun 21, 2011 at 5:24 PM, pipoca <eliyahu.ben.miney at gmail.com> wrote:
> If you were to have your anonymous sum types be a union instead of the
> disjoint union, then you could say that A :+: A has no meaning.
> That's what I was originally thinking of when I suggested that
> syntax.  However, as was pointed out to me by David Sankel, disjoint
> unions are more powerful than regular unions.  Since that's the case,
> Matthew Steele's suggested syntax makes more sense.  It means that you
> need to remember the order of your arguments, but you need to do that
> with tuples, anyway.

Of course, the same idea could be applied to tuples as well. An
"anonymous product" A :*: B would be a collection with no defined
order for its elements, indexed by type instead of position. A :*: A
would be meaningless for similar reasons to A :+: A.

That said, I don't think either retains the tidy algebraic properties
that disjoint unions and tuples have, so I'm not sure if calling them
sums and products is actually correct.

- C.