Haskell platform proposal: split package

[Gábor Lehel]

On Sat, Jul 21, 2012 at 2:34 AM, Brent Yorgey <byorgey at seas.upenn.edu> wrote:
> You are right, actually, only ExistentialQuantification is necessary,
> as long as we also stop using GADT syntax.  I didn't realize before
> that this syntax is accepted:
>
>   {-# LANGUAGE ExistentialQuantification #-}
>
>   data Delimiter a =         DelimEltPred (a -> Bool)
>                    | Eq a => DelimSublist [a]
>
> I do agree that this is a bit weird, what's going on here is not
> exactly existential quantification.  But in any case the
> ExistentialQuantification extension turns on this ability to embed
> class constraints in data constructors -- at least in GHC.

GADTs and ExistentialQuantification are pretty similar. There's only
two differences:
- Syntax
- GADTs enable equality constraints, ExistentialQuantification does not
But if you have equality constraints from somewhere else (say,
TypeFamilies) then ExistentialQuantification is equivalent to GADTs.

An unrelated suggestion: you can give type signatures to the various
functions which are synonyms of each other as a group and they will
show up as a single item in the Haddocks.

For example, instead of

-- | some docs
splitOn :: Eq a => [a] -> [a] -> [[a]]

-- | some other docs
sepBy :: Eq a => [a] -> [a] -> [[a]]

-- | different docs
unintercalate :: Eq a => [a] -> [a] -> [[a]]

you can have

-- | one and only docs
splitOn, sepBy, unintercalate :: Eq a => [a] -> [a] -> [[a]]

I don't know if you consider this an improvement. I think I do.

-- 
Your ship was caught in a monadic eruption.