[Haskell-cafe] Constants in Class definitions - could not deduce

[Claude Heiland-Allen]

Hi Martin,

On 18/05/14 15:54, martin wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> in my attempt to solve a Calendar related problem, I wanted to define Months and Weekdays such that I can increment a
> value. Unlike the "succ" Funktion in Enum my "inc" function shall circle endlessly.
>
> I came up with the following
>
> class (Ix a, Enum a) => Incrementable a where
>          from :: a
>          to  :: a
>          inc :: a -> a
>          inc x = [from .. to] !! ((1 + index (from, to) x) `mod` rangeSize (from,to))
>
> but GHC complains:
>
> /home/martin/projects/haskell/euler/p19.hs:39:65:
>      Could not deduce (Ix a0) arising from a use of `rangeSize'
>      from the context (Incrementable a)
>
> I suppose this is because GHC does not know that I want "to" and "from" to be taken from the same instance as x. If I
> replace the signature of "from" by "a -> a" and implement it by using a function which throws aways its argument, the
> types become clear and GHC no longer complains.
>
> Alternatively I can omit the implementation of "inc" in the class and leave that to the instances. I can easily fix the
> types in the instances, but this leads to some code duplication.
>
> I tried (from::a) to fix the type, but this had no effect. How is this done correctly?

You could use `asTypeOf` (which is `const` with a specialized type):


class (Ix a, Enum a) => Incrementable a where
         from :: a
         to  :: a
         inc :: a -> a
         inc x = [f .. t] !! ((1 + index (f, t) x) `mod` rangeSize (f,t))
           where f = from `asTypeOf` x ; t = to `asTypeOf` x


hth,


Claude
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