[Template-haskell] GADTs
Robert Dockins
robdockins at fastmail.fm
Mon Aug 14 11:34:19 EDT 2006
On Aug 14, 2006, at 4:51 AM, Simon Peyton-Jones wrote:
> | Also, TH tries to present the completely sugared language to the
> user;
> | otherwise it would probably work on something more like core.
>
> This really is a tension, and one I don't really know how to resolve.
>
> GHC does represent fully-sugared syntax, including even the
> placement of
> parens.
>
> I don't think TH need go to these lengths. TH generates code that we
> might read, but which is mainly intended to be compiled. It's *also*
> intended to be processed by other TH code, so the smaller the TH data
> type, the better.
>
> I conclude that TH should avoid gratuitous syntactic sugar. Anything
> that can be converted to a simpler equivalent form, should be.
> Hence I
> rather think that infix operators in TH are a mistake. What do they
> really buy us? Similarly an if-expression, and arithmetic
> sequence, and
> list expressions. On the other hand, a list comprehension is much
> more
> complicated to desugar, so probably deserves to be there.
>
> It'd be good to discuss this and perhaps agree some changes.
>
> Concerning data types, I think it'd be fine to present data types in a
> single, canonical representation as a data type, probably something
> like
> the GADT style. That'd be a breaking change, mind you.
I'd just like to voice my agreement with this general idea. I might
even suggest going one step further; divorce the world of TH from the
Haskell front end altogether. Specify that TH operates in a
convenient core language which is general enough to cover all the
interesting haskell extensions (say, Fc http://research.microsoft.com/
%7Esimonpj/papers/ext%2Df/). Then, various implementations of TH can
simply differ in the TH programs they accept (eg, a pure H98 impl
might only accept the Fc fragment with sort TY). But I think the
important thing is to specify TH in a way that is at least somewhat
independent of other haskell extensions.
Of course, the devil's in the details...
> Because there are design choices here, I'm dubious about getting
> any of
> this into 6.6. Time is very short, and we don't want to make a change
> that we re-change later.
>
> Simon
Rob Dockins
Speak softly and drive a Sherman tank.
Laugh hard; it's a long way to the bank.
-- TMBG
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