Can we simplify Dynamic?
David Feuer
david.feuer at gmail.com
Mon Sep 28 21:51:53 UTC 2015
Currently,
data Dynamic = Dynamic TypeRep Obj
deriving Typeable
where
type Obj = Any
As a result, all of the operations must be implemented "by hand" using
unsafeCoerce. The more obvious representation these days would seem to be
data Dynamic where
Dynamic :: Typeable a => a -> Dynamic
Most of the operations then become trivial applications of Typeable
functions. The only exceptions seem to be dynApply and dynApp. That
there are exceptions strikes me as quite unfortunate. The easiest fix is
inspired by the fact that Data.Dynamic uses
funResultTy :: TypeRep -> TypeRep -> Maybe TypeRep
from Data.Typeable to decide whether to coerce. It seems reasonable to add
a more informative version, something like
applyTypeable :: (Typeable f, Typeable a) =>
proxy f ->
proxy a ->
(forall b . (Typeable b, f ~ (a -> b)) => r) ->
Maybe r
On the other hand, it would be really cool if there were some more general
way to get type-level information out of Typeable instances, pattern
matching on the type constructors.
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