[Haskell] Implicit Parameters

[Ashley Yakeley]

Ben Rudiak-Gould wrote:
> I'd advise against using implicit parameters, because (as you've seen) 
> it's hard to reason about when they'll get passed to functions.

And Johannes Waldmann wrote:
 > Implicit parameters are *evil*. They seem to simplify programs
 > but they make reasoning about them much harder.

Feh. Implicit parameters are often exactly what you want. You just have 
to make sure to provide type signatures (-Wall -Werror can help here).

In fact it would be useful to allow implicit parameters and other type 
context at the top level of a module:

   forall m. (Monad m,?getCPUTime :: m Integer) => module MyModule where
     timeFunction :: forall a. m a -> m (Integer,a)
     timeFunction ma = do
       t0 <- ?getCPUTime
       a <- ma
       t1 <- ?getCPUTime
       return (t1 - t0,a)

This is just syntactic sugar that gives this:

   timeFunction :: forall m a. (Monad m,?getCPUTime :: m Integer) =>
      m a -> m (Integer,a)

In a future Haskell Operating System, this is how system functions could 
be provided to application code. This would make secure sandboxes easy 
to set up, for instance.

-- 
Ashley Yakeley