Records in Haskell
b.hilken at ntlworld.com
Sat Feb 25 00:07:52 CET 2012
> I share Greg's concerns about polymorphic projections. For example,
> given a function
> sort :: Ord a => ...
> we don't allow any 'a' that happens to export a operator that's
> spelled <= to be passed to 'sort'. We have the user explicitly create
> an instance and thereby defining that their <= is e.g. a strict weak
> ordering and thus make sense when used with 'sort'. This explicitness
> is useful, it communicates the contract of the function to the reader
> and lets us catch mistakes in a way that automatically polymorphic
> projections don't.
But the difference is that <= is (potentially) an arbitrary function, so we need to be careful that the instances make sense. A formally correct system would insist that all instances are (at least) reflexive and transitive. But in the case of records, we know what the instances are: they are projection functions. Every single (automatically generated) instance does exactly the same thing: it projects out one component of a record. This isn't like OO polymorphism, where "messages" are actually arbitrary functions which could do anything, the polymorphism is exactly the same as that of fst and snd.
> At the very least use two different LANGUAGE pragmas so users can have
> one without the other.
This I can agree with. It was the way that Greg mentioned it in every single email which was starting to worry me.
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