[Haskell-cafe] Local types

[M Farkas-Dyck]

On 25/01/2016, Imants Cekusins <imantc at gmail.com> wrote:
> could this not be better addressed by allowing explicit export /
> hiding of instances in a module?

That wouldn't enable such definitions as mine earlier, where the
instance is defined in terms of other local terms.

> does not type declaration inside function come at a performance cost?

Newtype declaration doesn't as they are elided at build time, and (at
least with GHC) the program would merely pass a class dictionary with
the locally-defined methods.

On 25/01/2016, Imants Cekusins <imantc at gmail.com> wrote:
> Currently module does not give control over instance export. Should
> this not be addressed first?

To my knowledge this would be a breach of consistency of instances:
one could so define terms with instances in conflict [0].

[0] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8728596/explicitly-import-instances

On 25/01/2016, Yuras Shumovich <shumovichy at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm not sure how your example works w.r.t. type variable scopes. Are
> you assuming ScopedTypeVariables? It will probably require explicit
> quantification to work:
>
> ordNubBy :: forall a. (a -> a -> Ordering) -> [a] -> [a]

Yes, indeed, thanks for catching that ☺

> In general, I see increasing demand for change scoping in haskell. For
> example see
>
> ...
>
> Probably all of that should be addressed in a complex.

I think my proposal is orthogonal to all those as none of them seems
to allow local instances defined in terms of other local terms.