unsafeCoerce and type aliases under type applications

wren ng thornton wren at freegeek.org
Sun Dec 4 06:50:23 CET 2011


On 12/3/11 9:07 PM, Felipe Almeida Lessa wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 3, 2011 at 5:39 PM, Joachim Breitner
> <mail at joachim-breitner.de>  wrote:
>> have used unsafeCoerce to change the type inside a container to a "type"
>> alias in real code, but your post makes me wonder: Under what
>> circumstances is that safe? Is that documented somehow? Can a tool or
>> the compiler decide for us whether it is safe?
>
> AFAIK, newtypes are safe, and for everything else you're on your own.  =)

N.B., newtypes are safe in the sense of congruent rewriting; i.e., if X 
is a newtype of Y, then we can rewrite X to Y (or Y to X) in any subterm 
of the type term (just like if X = Y or X ~ Y). It's not just at the 
top-level of the type term.

-- 
Live well,
~wren



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