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

Wed Feb 24 13:38:07 UTC 2016

Of course a pair is a container of two things (which can have different types).
You can come up with some different definition of what it means to be a container, so that a pair is no longer a container of two things, but this is just obfuscation.

From: Libraries [mailto:libraries-bounces at haskell.org] On Behalf Of Nathan Bouscal
Sent: 24 February 2016 13:29
To: Haskell Libraries
Subject: Re: Haskell Foldable Wats (Was: Add conspicuously missing Functor instances for tuples)

On Wed, Feb 24, 2016 at 1:04 PM, Henrik Nilsson <Henrik.Nilsson at nottingham.ac.uk<mailto:Henrik.Nilsson at nottingham.ac.uk>> wrote:
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?

You can use essentially the same argument to say that [a] sounds like a container of any number of elements, therefore there shouldn't be anything wrong with [1, 'foo']. It's not uncommon in programming for "what a thing naively sounds like" to be quite different from "what a thing actually is". Tuples are not lists.

I agree that there's room for confusion, but there is room for confusion in a lot of parts of Haskell, especially for people who bring a lot of preconceived notions with them. We should try to make the transition easier for them, but to me that looks a lot more like "really good error messages" and less like pointedly ignoring the structure of types that might be confusing.

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<mailto:nhn at cs.nott.ac.uk>

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