[Haskell-cafe] Constraints as a moveable feast?

[Anthony Clayden]

> On  *Tue Sep 1 21:18:40 UTC 2020, ** Richard Eisenberg wrote:*

*> *I see the core idea as a fairly straightforward generalization of the
"Partial Type Constructors" work

Ah. Now I see a bit more of what you're getting at. We want as if the
type synonym were an associated type family with a most-general
instance


    class Num a => CPoint a  where

      type Point a

    instance Num a => CPoint a  where

      type Point a = (a, a)


The semantics to be as the PTC paper, such that expanding `Point a`
always requires a `CPoint a` instance, which will in turn want a `Num
a`.

And the expansion to be immediate (as with type synonyms) so that the
client can put `Point a` in instance heads, for example.


> But I really don't know what it means to expand without adding parens. ... what about

>    *pointX :: Point a -> a*

*> ... *We don't want that type to expand to (Num a => (a, a)) -> a


Ok, it was your using fancy type operators that put me off. We can
represent the AST (and show the need for parens) by reverting to
prefix syntax, within H98:


    pointX :: (->) (Point a) a     -- needs parens around (Point a)


And yes my naieve syntactic expansion would give the type you show,
wot we do not want.


AntC
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/attachments/20200910/29980d85/attachment.html>