[Haskell-cafe] Question about constraining functions to particular ADT constructors

Román González romanandreg at gmail.com
Thu Jun 11 16:54:54 UTC 2015


Hello there,

I've been thinking on different approaches to constraint particular
functions to a particular constructor of an ADT in order to reduce
representation of invalid states. Say for example I've this types:

data Address = Address { ... }
newtype Email = Email String
data Package = Package { ... }
data EmailMsg = EmailMsg { ... }

data User
  = RealUser Address
   | VirtualUser Email

And I would like to implement two functions:

deliverPackage :: User -> Package -> IO Bool
sendEmail :: User -> EmailMsg -> IO ()

I would like to constraint both deliverPackage and sendEmail to receive
only the semantically correct constructor of User.

I know of an approach I could use, that is wrapping each constructor in
it's own newtype, and create some smart constructor that way, that approach
works, but I find it rather verbose.

Is there any other well known approach to deal with this scenarios?
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