[Haskell-cafe] No "fields of ... not initialized" warning with RecordWildCards and Void?

[Tom Ellis]

On Mon, Nov 01, 2021 at 04:07:02PM +0200, Markus Läll wrote:
> Would it make sense to suppress the "fields of ... not initialized" when
> the type of the field is Void, or any other type with no data constructors?
> As the only way to construct void would be `undefined :: Void`, and the
> field already is undefined.

It makes the opposite of sense to me.  The warning is there to tell
you when you've failed to initialize a field.  Whether you *can't*
initialise a field because its type has no values makes no difference.
You're still not initialising it!

I sometimes use a polymorphic field to indicate whether a constructor
can be present or not.  For example

data Expr a = Zero | One | Sum Expr Expr | Product a Expr Expr

Now `type ProductExpr = Expr ()` is an `Expr` which might contain
`Product`s. `type NoProductExpr = Expr Void` is an `Expr` which
cannot because I "can't" write a `Product` constructor for it (at
least not without getting a warning).

I'm curious: how come you're in the situation where you need to fill
in product types with `Void` entries?

Tom