Fixing Fix

[wren romano]

On 22/03/2015 at 23:01:47 -0400, David Feuer wrote:
> There are a good number of different packages that define either
>
> newtype Fix f = Fix (f (Fix f))
>
> or something equivalent except for naming. Most of the name variation
> is in the name of the data constructor and/or record selector. This
> does not look like an ideal situation to me. Most problematically, the
> only way to convert one to another is with unsafeCoerce.
>
> I think it would be rather nice to choose one canonical place for this
> definition, and let everyone else use it.

+1


On Tue, Mar 24, 2015 at 2:23 AM, M Farkas-Dyck <strake888 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I propose
>
> module Data.Fix where

I'd move it to Data.Functor.Fix, so as to help clean up the
Data.Everything situation


> newtype Fix f = Fix { unFix :: f (Fix f) }

One issue with this particular definition is that the derived Show
instance (if any) is quite verbose and ugly. For this sort of newtype
construction, I typically define unFoo as a function rather than using
the record notation precisely to clean up such noise.


> Perhaps too we ought to name and define _ :: (∀ a . f a -> g a) -> Fix f -> Fix g there.

The big question here is what to call it. And, really, we probably
want all the functions from unification-fd:Data.Functor.Fixedpoint
(perhaps excluding all the y- functions).


-- 
Live well,
~wren