Extensible downcasts impossible in Haskell? (was Re: Monomorphism, monomorphism...)

9 Oct 2001 17:52:20 GMT

Tue, 9 Oct 2001 10:50:19 +1300, Tom Pledger <Tom.Pledger@peace.com> pisze:

> I'm curious about this impossibility.
> 
>   - Is it well known?  If so, would someone please refer me to a paper
>     or posting which explains it?

I don't know. I'm not even sure if some clever encoding couldn't
express it, but I can't imagine how it could do it and I would guess
that it's impossible.

It's not easy to formulate the question precisely but I'm quite
sure that it's a well defined problem.

You want to be able to embed arbitrary Haskell types in "subtypes".
So it doesn't suffice to make a universal type with many useful
concrete types under constructors, which emulates dynamically
typed languages with a fixed number of types like Lisp or Erlang
(I think). Because an interface of abstract types not included in
this set may have binary methods or alike, so you can't just wrap the
interface in a tuple of functions with types taken from the included
set only.

>   - Does it just affect Haskell 98, or does it have deep implications
>     for any future language extensions?

IMHO it's independent from most extensions.

The only extension I know of which could be used for implementing
downcasts is Dynamic. Some extensible algebraic types (where definition
of constructors is spread among an open set of modules) would allow
downcasts too I think.

>   - How does it relate to the alternative record mechanism idea you
>     mentioned a while ago?
> 
>     http://haskell.org/pipermail/haskell/2000-December/000213.html

My mechanism doesn't allow downcasts, although it promotes a style
of programming which probably wants to use downcasts sometimes.

It's described as a translation to Haskell 98 with multiparameter
classes, fundeps, the ability to gather label names from all
modules and associate each name with an unique class, and some
small adjustments of the type system (related to the termination of
typechecking). These extensions don't provide anything useful for
implementing downcasting, so I couldn't implement downcasts without
changing the compiler even if I specified them somehow.

-- 
 __("<  Marcin Kowalczyk * qrczak@knm.org.pl http://qrczak.ids.net.pl/
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