[Haskell] Re: Implicit Parameters

[Simon Marlow]

Ashley Yakeley wrote:
> 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.

Simon & I have discussed doing some form of thread-local state, which 
covers many uses of implicit parameters and is much preferable IMO. 
Thread-local state doesn't change your types, and it doesn't require 
passing any extra parameters at runtime.  It works perfectly well for 
the OS example you give, for example.

Cheers,
	Simon