[Haskell-cafe] class instances for kinds with finite ty constrs, does this make sense?

ex falso 0slemi0 at gmail.com
Thu Jun 7 20:32:45 CEST 2012


Hi, i've been using DataKinds for a while and there seems to be a
recurring annoyance that could be possibly eliminated with a language
extension. It goes something like this:

data Tuple (l :: [*]) where
  Unit :: Tuple '[]
  Comma :: a -> Tuple as -> Tuple (a ': as)

data Proxy k = Proxy

class TupleLength (l :: [*]) where
  tupleLength :: Proxy l -> Integer
instance TupleLength '[] where
  tupleLength _ = 0
instance (TupleLength as) => TupleLength '(a : as) where
  tupleLength _ = 1 + tupleLength (Proxy :: Proxy as)

so far so good. but now if we want to use TupleLength:

printLength :: (TupleLength l) => Tuple l -> IO ()
printLength t = print $ tupleLength t

we always have to put the class restriction (TupleLength l) there,
even though all possible type constructors of [*] have a TupleLength
instance defined!

If we had a way to signal that all ty constrs are catered for then the
compiler could check this, and deduce that l::[*] is always an
instance. Well that's the hypothesis.
Of course this would only make sense for kinds with finite no. of ty
constructors, namely DataKinds-lifted types.

Does this make sense?
ex



More information about the Haskell-Cafe mailing list