[Haskell-cafe] is it possible to implement Functor for ByteString and Text

[Chris Wong]

On Sun, Mar 1, 2015 at 8:11 AM, silvio <silvio.frischi at gmail.com> wrote:
> I have recently heard that some people want to burn bridges (introducing
> Foldable and Traversable to Prelude) and I've been wondering if it was
> possible somehow allow Text and Bytestring like containers to make use
> of those functions. Something along the lines of
>
> import qualified Data.ByteString as BS
>
> newtype ByteString' a = ByteString' BS.ByteString
>
> type ByteString = ByteString' Word8
>
> instance (ByteString' a ~ ByteString' Word8) => Functor (ByteString')
>     where
>         fmap f (ByteString' bs) = ByteString' $ BS.map f bs

If tweak the definition of Functor a bit, we can get that to work:

{-# LANGUAGE ConstraintKinds, TypeFamilies #-}

import qualified Data.ByteString as B
import Data.Word (Word8)
import GHC.Prim (Constraint)

newtype ByteString' a = ByteString' B.ByteString
    deriving (Eq, Ord, Show)

class Functor' f where
    type FunctorConstraint f a :: Constraint
    fmap' :: (FunctorConstraint f a, FunctorConstraint f b) => (a ->
b) -> f a -> f b

instance Functor' ByteString' where
    type FunctorConstraint ByteString' a = a ~ Word8
    fmap' f (ByteString' x) = ByteString' $ B.map f x

But I don't think it's possible with the original type class.

-- 
https://lambda.xyz