[Haskell-cafe] Implicit newtype unwrapping

[Gregory Crosswhite]

But it seems to me like the whole point of using "newtype" is because you *don't* want your new type to be used everywhere that the old type can be used;  otherwise you would just use "type" to create an alias.  The only convincing exception I have heard to this (as you helpfully explained to me) is that one might be forced to use newtype to make a piece of code use a different instance declaration for a type.

In particular, I am not sure what you are getting at with your example, since 

	one :: Integer
	one = 1

works just as well.  Why did you want to define a new type?

Cheers,
Greg

On Dec 2, 2009, at 6:40 PM, Greg Fitzgerald wrote:

>> That suggests that the feature we'd really like is a way
>> to declare that we want a type in a context to act as if it
>> had a different instance declaration for a given typeclass,
>> without having to go through newtype.
> 
> I'd want implicit type coercion from subtypes, so that you wouldn't
> need an infinite hierarchy of nested typeclasses to implement the
> following for all integers:
> 
>  data One = One
> 
>  -- Somehow tell GHC that One is a subset of Integer (without
> implementing Num)
>  oneToInteger :: One -> Integer
>  oneToInteger One = 1
> 
>  One + One == (2 :: Integer)
> 
> Seems like something Agda could handle.
> 
> -Greg