[Haskell-cafe] Pattern match checking for GADTs

Simon Peyton Jones simonpj at microsoft.com
Thu Feb 19 17:37:55 UTC 2015


Friends
George Karachalas, Tom Schrijvers, Dimitrios Vytiniotis, and I are working on finally cracking the problem of accurately reporting pattern-match overlap and redundancy warnings, in the presence of GADTs.   You know the problem; consider

vzip :: Vect n a -> Vect n b -> Vect n (a,b)

vzip VN        VN        = VN

vzip (VC x xs) (VC y ys) = VC (x,y) (vzip xs ys)



data Vect :: Nat -> * -> * where

  VN :: Vect Zero a

  VC :: a -> Vect n a -> Vect (Succ n) a
Are there any missing equations in vzip?  No!  But GHC complains anyway.  We have lots of Trac tickets about this; e.g. https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/3927.
We now have a draft paper (wait a week) and a prototype implementation, that fixes the problem. But we need your help. We'd like to try our prototype on real code, not just toy examples.

So, could you send George a pointer to any packages you have, or know of, that

*         use GADTS (or other fancy type features) and

*         would benefit from accurate pattern-match overlap/redundancy warnings?
Specifically:

*         Where you have had to add a catch-all

f _ _ = error "impossible"

to silence GHC from saying "missing patterns"

*         Or where you have added {-# OPTIONS_GHC -fno-warn-missing-patterns #-} to silence the warnings.

*         Or something else like that.
George's email is in cc.
Time is short - the ICFP deadline is on 27 Feb.  So sooner is better than later for us.  But later is better than never.
Thank you!
Simon
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