[Haskell-cafe] Explicitly calling syntactic equality on datatypes

[Juan Casanova]

Quoting MarLinn <monkleyon at gmail.com> on Wed, 18 Sep 2019 14:53:32 +0200:

> What about phantom types?
>
> 	{-# LANGUAGE KindSignatures, DataKinds #-}
> 	data IsNormalized = Normalized | NotNormalized
> 	data Sum (n :: IsNormalized) = Value Int | Sum (Sum n) (Sum n)
>
> 	normalizeSum :: Sum NotNormalized -> Sum Normalized -- or even  
> create a class with two inhabitants for this
> 	instance Eq (Sum NotNormalized) where (==) = (==) `on` normalizeSum
> 	instance Eq (Sum Normalized) where … -- real implementation


That looks quite good tbh. I did not know you could do that. Care to  
explain, are "Normalized" and "NotNormalized" types, data  
constructors, type families? A combination of them?

Of course you still have to write a fair amount of code, but it does  
look a lot better than what I've been using and what I've seen  
suggested so far. At least to me.

Thanks,
Juan.

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