[Haskell-cafe] reifying typeclasses

[Evan Laforge]

Thanks to everyone who replied, indeed it looks like GADTs do what I
claimed I wanted. That's neat because I've never been able to think of
a use for them.  However:

On Sun, Sep 15, 2013 at 2:16 AM,  <oleg at okmij.org> wrote:
> Why not to introduce several type classes, even a type class for each
> method if necessary. Grouping methods under one type class is
> appropriate when such a grouping makes sense. Otherwise, Haskell won't
> lose in expressiveness if a type class could have only one method.

That's a very good point too, and one I should have thought of first.
 It's the simplest and I think most idiomatic.  Ok, I guess I'm back
to not being able to think of a use for GADTs, it seems like that
happens whenever I think I have a use for a fancy feature :)

> The main drawback of the intensional type analysis as shown in the
> enclosed code is that it breaks parametricity. The constraint Eq a

I guess what you're saying is that since I'm implementing a
typeswitch, then I lose the nice feature of typeclasses that I know it
can't do anything with the value except what the typeclass provides.
In a sense, it loses type safety because it's too generic.  That's a
good point too.  No free lunch, I guess, you get one thing and lose
another.  Typeclasses, though, don't exploit the closed universe part,
though I can't think offhand how that hurts me.