newtype coercion wrapping status

[Joachim Breitner]

Hi,

Am Freitag, den 06.09.2013, 15:03 +0000 schrieb Simon Peyton-Jones:
> Sounds amazing Joachim -- great work.

Thanks!

> | Consider
> |         data Foo a = MkFoo (a,a).
> | The (virtual) instance
> |         instance Coercible a b => Coercible (Foo a) (Foo b)
> | can only be used when MkFoo is in scope, as otherwise the user could
> | break abstraction barriers. This is enforced.
> 
> Whoa!  Where did this instance come from?  I thought that we generated precisely two (virtual) instances for Foo:
> 
> 	instance Coercible a (b,b) => Coercible a (Foo b)
> 	instance Coercible (a,b) b => Coercible (Foo a) b
> 
> and no others.  That it.  Done.  That was precisely the payload of my message of 2 August, attached.
        
Well, that is the case when we want to unwrap a newtype. But this is not
the case here: We have a data type and we want to cast one of its type
arguments. Clearly, we want to have
        instance Coercible a b => Coercible [a] [b]
right? The instance above is just an other instance (heh) of that form.

The two virtual instances that you mention only make sense for newtype,
_in addition_ to the usual “cast something inside this type”.

> [..]
> 
> In short, I think that if you use the approach I outlined, all these problems go away.  Am I wrong?

I believe so; I hope I just clarified it.

Greetings,
Joachim

-- 
Joachim “nomeata” Breitner
  mail at joachim-breitner.de • http://www.joachim-breitner.de/
  Jabber: nomeata at joachim-breitner.de  • GPG-Key: 0x4743206C
  Debian Developer: nomeata at debian.org
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