Proposal: add a foldable law

[David Feuer]

I have another idea that might be worth considering. I think it's a lot
simpler than yours.

Law: If t is a Foldable instance, then there must exist:

1. A Traversable instance u and
2. An injective function
       toTrav :: t a -> u a

Such that

    foldMap @t = foldMapDefault . toTrav

I'm pretty sure this gets at the point you're trying to make.


On May 3, 2018 11:58 AM, "Gershom B" <gershomb at gmail.com> wrote:

This came up before (see the prior thread):
https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/libraries/2015-February/024943.html

The thread at that time grew rather large, and only at the end did I
come up with what I continue to think is a satisfactory formulation of
the law.

However, at that point nobody really acted to do anything about it.

I would like to _formally request that the core libraries committee
review_ the final version of the law as proposed, for addition to
Foldable documentation:

==
Given a fresh newtype GenericSet = GenericSet Integer deriving (Eq,
Ord), where GenericSet is otherwise fully abstract:

forall (g :: forall a. f a -> Maybe a), (x :: f GenericSet).
maybe True (`Foldable.elem` x) (g x) =/= False
==

The intuition is: "there is no general way to get an `a` out of `f a`
which cannot be seen by the `Foldable` instance". The use of
`GenericSet` is to handle the case of GADTs, since even parametric
polymorphic functions on them may at given _already known_ types have
specific behaviors.

This law also works over infinite structures.

It rules out "obviously wrong" instances and accepts all the instances
we want to that I am aware of.

My specific motivation for raising this again is that I am rather
tired of people saying "well, Foldable has no laws, and it is in base,
so things without laws are just fine." Foldable does a have a law we
all know to obey. It just has been rather tricky to state. The above
provides a decent way to state it. So we should state it.

Cheers,
Gershom
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