[Haskell-cafe] Instance Chains selection by class membership [was: [ghc-proposals/cafe] Partially applied type families]

[J. Garrett Morris]

On Sun, Jun 4, 2017 at 1:00 PM, Anthony Clayden
<anthony_clayden at clear.net.nz> wrote:
> Ok what was the fault in the 2010 paper?

You have reiterated a point that is made at length in §3.2 of my 2015
paper, and §3.4.2 of my dissertation.  I shouldn't, however, have
suggested in 2015 that the deduplicated version is necessarily
preferable.  If you omit the deduplication constraints, you simply end
up with Leijen-style scoped rows [Leijen, TFP05] instead of Rémy-Wand
style rows.  Of course, if, as we did in 2010, you use classes instead
of branching to implement elimination on variants, you have no way to
tell the difference between the two models of variants, and so there's
no reason to prefer one or the other.

> I'm working on showing how the Swierstra encoding
> could be catered for in Haskell 2010 + MPTCs+TypeEq.

You keep talking about guarding instances or equations.  Guards are
equivalent to closed type families, so of course they're sufficient to
implement Swierstra's encoding (following any of Bahr or Oliveira et
al. or my approaches), and will require auxiliary definitions and
indirections that would not be required using instance chains.

This conversation having precisely reattained its starting point, I
don't imagine I could contribute further.

 /g

-- 
Prosperum ac felix scelus virtus vocatur
 -- Seneca