[Haskell-cafe] "Least common supertype"?

[Eugene Kirpichov]

Is the name of the concept.... "Most general unifier" (MGU) ? (See:
Hindley-Milner type inference)

2009/11/11 Sean Leather <leather at cs.uu.nl>:
> Is there a name for the following concept? Can you point me to any
> references on it?
>
> Suppose I have the following two functions ...
>
>> swap1 :: (Int, Char) -> (Char, Int)
>> swap2 :: (Char, Int) -> (Int, Char)
>
> ... and, for some reason, I think I can unify these into a single function.
> I think, hmm, given that the structure is that same, let's do a first pass:
>
>> swap? :: (a, b) -> (c, d)
>
> But then I go back to the input types to confirm that this will work, and,
> alas, it will not, because there are similarities that I missed. This is way
> too general. I need to ensure that what's an Int stays an Int and likewise
> for Char.
>
>> swap! :: (a, b) -> (b, a)
>
> And now I have found a type that is more general than swap1 and swap2 and
> yet not so general that the shared constraints are left out. This seems
> somewhat analogous to the least common multiple.
>
> Another example is the following:
>
>> showFloat :: Float -> String
>> showBool :: Bool -> String
>
> We could say the more general type is ...
>
>> show? :: a -> String
>
> ... but then we lose the implied constraint that we must know something
> about 'a' to produce a string. So, we add back such some such constraint:
>
>> show! :: (Show a) => a -> String
>
> Of course, with all of this, it may not be clear what to do about the
> definitions of the functions, but I'm curious if there's a name for the
> concept from a type perspective.
>
> Thanks,
> Sean
>
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>



-- 
Eugene Kirpichov
Web IR developer, market.yandex.ru