Proposal: refactor Arrow class

[Edward A Kmett]

This is the moral equivalent of saying that Data.Functor doesn't need (<$) and Control.Applicative doesn't need (<*) and (*>) after all, its just instance declarations.

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On Jan 9, 2013, at 11:10 AM, Ross Paterson <ross at soi.city.ac.uk> wrote:

> On Wed, Jan 09, 2013 at 07:57:02AM +0000, Edward Kmett wrote:
>> It lets you lift core `cast`'s out over the functorial argument,
>> which isn't something I can do from outside of the class. If I tried
>> to write something where the end user hands me an arbitrary Functor (or
>> Profunctor) and I unsafeCoerce to cast, this would expose unsafeCoerce
>> to the end user. 
>> 
>> The implementation trick is to place these extra methods in the class
>> but hidden in an explicitly Unsafe module and with default definitions
>> that are correct but slow.
>> 
>> Then the provider of the functor-like class can explicitly import that
>> module, and implement the methods, and mark his module Trustworthy. He
>> hasn't exposed unsafeCoerce to the end user, they have to import an
>> explicitly Unsafe module to get access to it, incurring the obligation
>> themselves to provide something that is operationally id or a cast.
>> 
>> This enables you to have the efficient implementation but guarded by an
>> explicitly Unsafe module so the end user has to import that to get the
>> efficient functionality, but you can discharge your obligations locally.
>> 
>> Similarly you can discharge the obligation about the representation
>> of the operation you are passing at the use site. This means that you
>> can reason about these separately.
> 
> You could achieve the same effects by splitting off (.#) and (#.) into
> a subclass, couldn't you?  It would just mean more instance declarations.
> 
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