[Haskell-cafe] Restricted type classes

[C. McCann]

On Fri, Sep 3, 2010 at 11:47 AM, John Lato <jwlato at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 3, 2010 at 1:29 PM, Ivan Lazar Miljenovic <ivan.miljenovic at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 3 September 2010 22:23, John Lato <jwlato at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > Do you have a kind * implementation of Foldable?  I'd be interested in
>> > seeing it, because I was unable to create a usable implementation (based
>> > upon the RMonad scheme) on my last attempt.
>>
>> I was going to make it a subset of Foldable: fold, foldr, foldl, etc.
>
> So you don't have a working implementation yet?  I ended up thinking this is
> impossible, although I don't remember the reasoning that led me to that
> conclusion (and I could very well be wrong).
> I would suggest that you check this before going too far along the
> restricted-monad path.

This sounds odd to me. An RMonad-style version of Foldable is straightforward:

    class RFoldable t where
        rfold :: Control.RMonad.Suitable t a => (a -> b -> b) -> b -> t a -> b

    instance RFoldable Data.Set.Set where
        rfold = Data.Set.fold

A similar class for types of kind * is also straightforward:

    class Reduce t where
        type Elem t
        reduce :: (Elem t -> r -> r) -> r -> t -> r

    instance Reduce Data.ByteString.ByteString where
        type Elem Data.ByteString.ByteString = Word8
        reduce = Data.ByteString.foldr

Both seem to work as I'd expect. Am I missing something? Foldable is
pretty trivial--perhaps it was Traversable that you found problematic?

- C.