[Haskell-cafe] Re: What I wish someone had told me...

[Jonathan Cast]

On Wed, 2008-10-15 at 13:01 -0700, Daryoush Mehrtash wrote:
> I am having hard time understanding this statement:
> 
>         Haskell types lack constructors, so the user never expects to
>         be
>         able to conjure up a value of an unknown type.
> 
> I am not sure how say in a Java language a constructor can "conjure up
> a value of an unknown type".

Well, that's the point.  It can't, in Haskell or in Java.  If you
understand that --- that you can't call the default constructor of a
class that is not statically known at compile time --- then there's no
`gotcha', in Haskell or Java.  The gotcha in Java is that every type
that actually exists does in fact have a default constructor, and every
type of the form Set<T> actually has a copy constructor, and so on.  But
if T isn't statically known at compile time, you can't call it, even
though it's guaranteed to exist.  In Java, even if I know nothing else
about a class T, I know that Set<T> has a copy constructor.  So I can
get into the habit of calling the Set<T> copy constructor, without
paying attention to whether T is statically known or not --- which
breaks when T is a generic parameter.

So Haskell lacks the `gotcha' because you never get into the bad habit
of assuming every type has a constructor in the first place.

jcc