[Haskell] Views in Haskell

[John Meacham]

Hmm.. this misses one of the major advantages of views IMHO, pattern
synonyms, which would let you seamlessly upgrade interfaces to ADTs, which at
the moment is cumbersome, you either have to plan from the beginning and
use functions instead of pattern matching or create a new, incompatable
API. in a few cases, records can also be used.

so, oddly enough, the views subset I wanted to see would be something
like this

> data Term = Var String | Terms [Term] where
>    EmptyTerm = Terms []

now, EmptyTerm can be used in pattern matching and as a normal
constructor. The restrictions to the RHS of such declaraions are
straightforward, the arguments must be valid, no variables may appear
free. irrefutable patterns would be allowed, they would have no effect
when using the alias as a constructor, but would have their normal
meaning when used as a pattern match. in addition '_' would be allowed,
having its normal meaning when used as a pattern match, but becoming
'undefined' when used as a constructor.

perhaps this is unrelated to views, but this sort of thing is what I
found attractive about the old proposal.

        John

-- 
John Meacham - ⑆repetae.net⑆john⑈