[Haskell-cafe] Foldable for (,)

Chris Smith cdsmith at gmail.com
Thu May 4 20:52:38 UTC 2017


My answer this is: because Foldable instances on tuples make Haskell
programming more dangerous.

With all instances, there is some risk of accidental unification with
broken programs.  But in general, we are saved by one of two things: either
the types are special-purpose enough that they are unlikely to occur by
accident, or unification just propagates the incorrect type and the
compiler merely puts the error message is in the wrong place.

With length and tuples, though, we're talking about a type that's used
casually in many situations; and the accidental unification does not
propagate the type at all.  Instead, it just generates incorrect code.
That's a bit scary!

It's unfortunate that discussions of this tend to get muddied by the
possibility of length having a different meaning on tuples.  Really, IMHO,
that's not even related to the problem.  The problem is that accidental
unification is more risky here than anywhere other commonly used bit of
Haskell that I can find.

On Thu, May 4, 2017 at 1:32 PM, MarLinn <monkleyon at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> This to me is the center of the conversation: we're choosing whether we need the instances badly enough that we tolerate some, ahem, bad behavior.
>
>
> I dispute that. To me, the center of the disagreement is between two
> different kinds of consistency: On the one hand, there's the consistency
> with a view of the world that treats One as a special number different from
> all other numbers. This view is based on the real world where singularities
> seem rampant. On the other side is consistency with a math-y view of the
> world that wants to unify as much as possible so we can reduce the number
> of models, thus, work.
>
> But if you want to treat the cardinality of one specially, do you want to
> drop Const and Identity, too? Const is closer to tuples than lists are, so
> why not cut them out as well? But then we had examples in just this
> conversation where Const and Identity where really useful. What argument is
> left to remove instances for tuples? If you can get over the 5-second
> weirdness of Const, why not tuples?
> At the end I claim there is no bad behavior. I do give you that there is
> *missing* behavior because the choice to have only that one instance per
> tuple size is a bit arbitrary and misleading. And that is hard to change
> for now. But do you really want to remove those few instances we do have
> just because we're not ready to include the others yet?
>
> MarLinn
>
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