Proposal: Add IsString instance for (Maybe a) to base

[Edward Kmett]

I was at first against this proposal by a knee jerk "but it isn't a string"
response.

But now, after considering it, I'm (mildly) in favor of this proposal just
because a.) it only affects you once you've turned on OverloadedStrings
which serves as a clear indication that hinky stuff might be going on, and
b.) it is the only place such an instance could live that isn't an orphan
and c.) it is the least prescriptive option. Very few of the users in the
more prescriptivist camp are using OverloadedStrings to begin with. ;)

The proposed laws for how fromString and Monoid should relate largely
ignore the existing usecases people have for tokenizing parsers and
embedding string literals in ASTs -- which as I recall was a decent part of
why Lennart originally put fromString forward, so I'm not sure I can
concede the moral high ground to those citing the fact that we might want
to put laws on the class. It might have been nice to put some laws in place
about the class, but the laws that have been put forth largely ignore how
this language extension gets used in practice.

-Edward

On Sun, Jul 14, 2013 at 9:40 PM, Conrad Parker <conrad at metadecks.org> wrote:

> On 10 July 2013 05:24, Simon Hengel <sol at typeful.net> wrote:
> > Hi,
> > what about adding
> >
> >     instance IsString a => IsString (Maybe a) where
> >       fromString = Just . fromString
> >
> > It makes specifying optional String/Text/... values more convenient.
> > Here is an example that uses System.Process.shell:
> >
> > Use
> >
> >     shell "ls -l" { cwd = "/home/me" }
> >
> > instead of
> >
> >     shell "ls -l" { cwd = Just "/home/me" }
> >
> > I'm not yet sure how essential it is.  But I somehow can't see any
> > issues with it.  So why not?
>
> +1
>
> After reviewing the resulting discussion I agree that there's no
> possible ambiguity and Simon's use-case is compelling. I think it's
> great that this allows us to write obvious code without cluttering the
> common use-case with Justs, while still allowing the underlying types
> to be properly expressive (ie. admitting a Nothing value when that is
> appropriate). This is especially important for a DSL that uses lots of
> strings, like shell scripting.
>
> I think (Maybe String) is a perfectly good string; it's just a string
> type that has an extra value of Nothing -- and Nothing doesn't even
> play a part in the IsString instance.
>
> Conrad.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Libraries mailing list
> Libraries at haskell.org
> http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/libraries
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/libraries/attachments/20130714/21aba6f3/attachment.htm>