Haskell Foldable Wats (Was: Add conspicuously missing Functor instances for tuples)

[Henrik Nilsson]

Hi,

On 02/24/2016 11:08 AM, Fumiaki Kinoshita wrote:
> Thinking tuples of as multi-element containers is not recommended. A
> tuple (a, b) is, a pair of one 'a' and one 'b';

Which, to me, at least, very much sounds like a container of two
elements?

Seriosuly, if, as a result of tuples being instances of Functor and
Foldable etc., the end result is confusion to the point that
many no longer understand a tuple simply as a container of a certain
number of elements, then that's another case in point against
this whole design. (In particular the Foldable part: while I personally
don't find the functor instances particularly compelling or useful,
they seem less likely to seriously bite.)

> as Foldable works on
> values pointed by the rightmost type argument, 1 should be the only
> reasonable result of 'length'.
>
>      data TwoThree a b = TwoThree a a b b b
>
> What should 'length (TwoThree "Foo" "Bar" 0 1 2)' be?

A static type error, perhaps?

(As indeed it will be unless the appropriate instances are made
for TwoThree. But I am guessing we should understand TwoThree
as a tuple here.)

> Looking at only
> the expression, 5 might seem to make sense, but is not meaningful
> considering the type.
>

Best,

/Henrik
-- 
Henrik Nilsson
School of Computer Science
The University of Nottingham
nhn at cs.nott.ac.uk




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