role signatures in libraries

[Anthony Cowley]

On Mon, Dec 2, 2013 at 3:00 PM, Richard Eisenberg <eir at cis.upenn.edu> wrote:
> Hi John,
>
> Good questions!
>
> On Nov 27, 2013, at 3:35 PM, John Lato wrote:
>
> Consider data V a = V Int (ForeignPtr a), a storable vector, where the Int
> is the number of elements.  We would then want to add 'type role V nominal'
> as the stored data depends on the Storable instance for the 'a' parameter.
> Is this correct?
>
>
>
> If you want to be fully safe in the presence of different Storable
> dictionaries for Age and Int, yes, you should declare `a` to be nominal.
> However, it's much more likely that Age and Int have the same implementation
> for Storable, and it might be much more convenient for your users to be able
> to freely convert between `V Age` and `V Int`. I would say that this is a
> judgment call -- nominal is safer (always), but representational may be more
> practical.

For the record, I use newtypes to pick out different Storable
instances rather a lot, and would find it awfully inconvenient if
library authors started assuming otherwise.

Anthony