suggestion: A common type class for mutable variables

[Petr Pudlák]

Dne 06/03/2013 09:11 PM, Henning Thielemann napsal(a):

>
> On Mon, 3 Jun 2013, Edward Kmett wrote:
>
>> The first option is
>>
>> class Monad m => MonadRef r m | m -> r where
>>   newRef :: a -> m (r a)
>>   ...
>>
>> This has the benefit of using quite portable extensions.
>>
>> The second option is
>>
>> class Monad m => MonadRef m where  type Ref m :: * -> *
>>   newRef :: a -> m (Ref m a)
>>
>> This takes us into GHC specific territory, by using type families, 
>> but avoids polluting every type that uses
>> one with an extra 'ref' param. I use this variant in my 
>> as-yet-unreleased 'revisions' package.
>>
>> Both of these have the benefit that they can work with transformers, 
>> but they carry the limitation that you
>> can't have multiple reference types for the same monad. e.g. you 
>> can't use the same combinators for both
>> IORefs and, say, MVars or TVars within the same monad. This is 
>> arguably not so much a problem as they have
>> very different operational semantics!
>
> I thought the functional dependency should be the other way round: 
> From the reference type to the monad where it lives in.

For monads, it's (AFAIK) always this way, because |m| is always in the 
result, but not necessarily the other type. Let's consider

|readRef  :: r a -> m a|

In order to type-check |x| in |readRef x|, we need to determine |r a| 
from |m a|, so the dependency must be |m -> r|.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/libraries/attachments/20130603/69109490/attachment.htm>