[Haskell-cafe] Language extension proposal: aspects

[MarLinn]

On 2017-05-07 11:21, Dmitry Olshansky wrote:
> But in this case I'm afraid that we end-up with the same noise as for 
> the newtype. But instead of construct to and deconstruct from newtype 
> we will have to define aspects on type level for caller and define 
> constraint for function. Usually type-level syntax is more complicated...

On the one hand, I get what you're saying. I'm not sure I'm totally 
convinced my idea is bad because of it, but I'll ponder that. On the 
other hand… in a way, we're working with two programming languages, a 
value level one and a type level one. And you're right that the type 
level programing language can be quite obtuse, even without my proposed 
additions. But I don't directly see that as an argument against my 
proposal. It's more of an argument to straighten out our type level 
language.

I mean what is our type level language? It's basically a logic 
programming language that guides a constraint solver. We state facts and 
relationships, and we get an "ok" or errors and as "side effects" we 
sometimes get dictionaries. Now look at Prolog and how simple it is. Our 
language is more specialized, so we have more specialized operators. But 
that alone would only make the language more complex, not necessarily 
more complicated. In an ideal world I would also just be able to use 
existing tools of our type level language to implement my additions. 
Right now I can't, so something is amiss.

To be honest I don't have any idea how to fix this. And as long as we 
don't, your argument against my proposal is indeed valid through this 
indirection. But I'm not happy that it is…

Cheers,
MarLinn