Strange error in show for datatype

[Simon Peyton-Jones]

| So, obviously, the next version of Haskell should have a type system=20
| with subtyping, don't you agree? :-)=20

It's always delightful to find that some awkward fumbling has
been Done Properly by someone else earlier.  My claim was that

	forall a. Show a =3D> T

could be implemented by passing a bottom dictionary for Show.  I didn't
say
this, but the obvious thing to do is to fix 'a' to be some vacuous type
Empty,
and arrange that Empty is an instance of every class, with a bottom
dictionary.  And you're telling us that the subtyping folk worked this
out
yonks ago.  Excellent!  (Reference, for this particular point?)

In a system with subtyping this would work even if T contained a free,
as you say.  But even in a system *without* subtyping, if 'a' is not
free in T,
we can safely remove the 'forall a' and fix a=3DEmpty.  (A calling =
context
can only "see" the types in T, so this places no constraints on the
calling context, which is why we don't need subtyping.)  I think this is

what your PPS suggested, yes?

So in fact, all we need do is:
	for each class, find the variance of each of its parameters
	in an ambiguous type, zap any positive parameters to Empty

That sounds pretty easy.  We don't need Haskell 2 for that.  I feel
a little implementation coming on.

Hmm. One question.  Suppose I have

	forall a. C (a->Int) Int =3D> T

and C is positive in its first parameter. Can I zap 'a' to Empty?
It looks as if it still occurs positively.  What about data types?

| PS In some previous version of Haskell (1.3?), the Prelude defined an=20
| empty type called Void, but it has since been removed. Apparently,=20
| people didn't see the potential of Void...

Void was a type with one element.  What we really want here is
a type with no elements.  It's also useful to be able to introduce
such empty types for phantom-type purposes, so GHC now lets you say

	data T

and get a type T with no values.

Simon

=20