[Haskell-cafe] looking for examples of non-full Functional Dependencies

[Lennart Augustsson]

BTW, here's a non-contrived example.  It's pretty easy to come up with
examples when you try to use type classes instead of a proper module system.

Here we have expressions parametrized over how identifiers and literals are
represented.  First a simple instance, and then one where all the types are
parametrized over the string representation.  These are the plug-and-play
type of things I'd like to be able to do.

class IsExpr expr id lit | expr -> id lit where
    eId :: id -> expr
    eLit :: lit -> expr
    eApply :: expr -> expr -> expr

data SimpleExpr = SId Char | SLit Int | SApply SimpleExpr SimpleExpr

instance IsExpr SimpleExpr Char Int where
    eId = SId
    eLit = SLit
    eApply = SApply

data FancyExpr str = FId (Id str) | FLit (Lit str) | FApply (FancyExpr str)
(FancyExpr str)

data Id str = Id str
data Lit str = LString str | LInt Int

instance IsExpr (FancyExpr str) (Id str) (Lit str) where
    eId = FId
    eLit = FLit
    eApply = FApply


On Fri, Apr 18, 2008 at 9:26 AM, Martin Sulzmann <martin.sulzmann at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Lennart Augustsson wrote:
>
> > To reuse a favorite word, I think that any implementation that
> > distinguishes 'a -> b, a -> c' from 'a -> b c' is broken. :)
> > It does not implement FD, but something else.  Maybe this something else
> > is useful, but if one of the forms is strictly more powerful than the other
> > then I don't see why you would ever want the less powerful one.
> >
> >  Do you have any good examples, besides the contrived one
>
> class D a b c | a -> b c
>
> instance D a b b => D [a] [b] [b]
>
> where we want to have the more powerful form of multi-range FDs?
>
> Fixing the problem who mention is easy. After all, we know how to derive
> improvement for multi-range FDs. But it seems harder to find agreement
> whether
> multi-range FDs are short-hands for single-range FDs, or
> certain single-range FDs, eg a -> b and a -> c, are shorthands for more
> powerful
> multi-range FDs a -> b c.
> I clearly prefer the latter, ie have a more powerful form of FDs.
>
> Martin
>
>
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