[Haskell-cafe] working my way through Data.Type.Equality...my head hurts...

Nicholls, Mark nicholls.mark at vimn.com
Tue Jan 13 13:14:43 UTC 2015


It is fairly vague…I think it gets me to understand in a hand wavy sort of way.

Let me look a little deeper.



On Tue, Jan 13, 2015 at 12:39 PM, Nicholls, Mark <nicholls.mark at vimn.com<mailto:nicholls.mark at vimn.com>> wrote:
But….


>  -- | Generalized form of type-safe cast using propositional equality

>  gcastWith :: (a :~: b) -> ((a ~ b) => r) -> r

>  gcastWith Refl x = x

I don’t even understand the signature

What does “~” mean…(it’s something that comes out in error messages when my types are all messed up)….and then there’s a “=>” going on…in the middle of a signature….I know “=>” in the context of “Num a => a -> a -> a”

a ~ b is a constraint that a and b are exactly the same type. For example, Int ~ Int is satisfiable, but Int ~ Bool is not. So what gcastWith does is take a witness that a and b are the same type (witnessed by the a :~: b value), and then lets you form a value using that evidence.

What would a value of type “((a ~ b) => r)” look like?

I can't come up with a workable example right now, but I could imagine that you might have:
   reverseReverse :: a :~: (Reverse (Reverse a))
Then if you have something that needs to work on a Reverse (Reverse a) value, but you only have a 'a' around, you can show GHC that it doesn't matter - because they are the same type:
  gcastWith reverseReverse :: (a ~ Reverse (Reverse a) => r) -> r
Presumably whatever 'r' is will refer to 'a' and do something with it (maybe mapping over a list or something).
Sorry that this is all fairly vague, but hopefully that gives you some leads.
-- ocharles

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