Proposal: Use (.) and id from Control.Category in Prelude

[Edward Kmett]

I'm somewhat neutral on the proposal.

On the plus side, generalizing Category fits with the current goal of
having base export one version of each combinator.

On the minus side, Category is far less used than the other abstractions
we're bringing into Prelude in 7.10.

Utimately? I'm ever so slightly in the 'we shouldn't do it' camp --  a very
weak -1 -- from the standpoint that Category is currently PolyKinded, which
is incredibly useful, and so far, nothing we export or are planning to
export from Prelude is.

It is currently very easy to propose the new Prelude we're building to the
folks on the Haskell' committee for standardization going forward.

With PolyKinds that becomes a rather bigger leap. Now, having implemented
PolyKinds in another compiler, they aren't too hard, just slightly tricky,
so that may be a thing we do want to do eventually, but I'd have a hard
time putting it forward for standardization with a straight face today.

I'd feel a bit more comfortable getting through the current wave of
generalization for 7.10, then revisiting if we should do this for 7.12 once
the community has had a chance to adapt.

If there was a huge upswell of support for this we could do it, but so far
the response has been one of measured indifference.

-Edward


On Mon, Jun 16, 2014 at 5:09 AM, Erik Hesselink <hesselink at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sun, Jun 15, 2014 at 4:13 PM, Herbert Valerio Riedel <hvr at gnu.org>
> wrote:
>
> > I wonder if Haskell could be extended to be able to write something like
> >
> >   import Data.Category
> >
> > and have the more general versions of (.) and id automatically shadow
> > the monomorphic versions brought in scope by the Prelude.
>
> We use a custom prelude that almost gives us this. You have to do:
>
> {-# LANGUAGE NoImplicitPrelude #-}
>
> import Prelude.Polymorphic
>
> This gives us Foldable/Traversable/Category polymorphic variants of
> the prelude functions. It's been a pretty good experience. The largest
> problem, as Edward already mentioned, are the re-exports of
> Control.Monad from the mtl package.
>
> I'm -1 on making (.) polymorphic by default though. The errors can be
> kind of intimidating for the beginning Haskeller. Let's first see how
> it goes with Foldable/Traversable in the prelude...
>
> Erik
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