[Haskell-cafe] Downsides to disabling unticked-promoted-constructor warning?

[Adam Gundry]

Hi,

On 16/10/2021 10:55, Markus Läll wrote:
> Is there any consensus on unticked promoted constructors -- are they
> generally safe to use?
> 
> Currently the warning is part of -Wall, but having promoted constructors
> unticked is just aesthetically nicer.

I don't know if there is a consensus, but I have long been of the
opinion that -Wunticked-promoted-constructors should be dropped from
-Wall and that GHC should not insert ticks when printing inferred types
unless including them is necessary for disambiguation. In particular, as
a library author I want to use DataKinds without my users having to know
or care what it does.

You can sometimes hide the ticks by defining a type synonym, e.g.

    data T = MkT
    type MkT = 'MkT

but there are cases where GHC exposes the difference still, e.g. if you
mention MkT in a class instance head.

Cheers,

Adam


-- 
Adam Gundry, Haskell Consultant
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