Nicolas Frisby:
From the error below, I'm inferring that the RHS of the associated
type definition can only contain type variables from the instance
head, not the instance context. I didn't explicitly see this
restriction when reading the GHC/Type_families entry.
Could perhaps the "a b -> bn" functional dependency of the TypeEq
class lift this restriction for bn? This isn't my ball park, but that
idea has my hopes up :).
<haskell>
{-# LANGUAGE TypeFamilies #-}
import TypeEq
-- Attempting to encapsulate TypeEq behind an associated type.
class EQ a b where
type BN a b
instance TypeEq a b bn => EQ a b where
type BN a b = bn
</haskell>
results in an error
<ghci>
/tmp/Test.hs:9:16: Not in scope: type variable `bn'
Failed, modules loaded: none.
</ghci>
GHC is right, you cannot use 'bn' in the definition of the type family
instance. I agree that the documentation needs to make this clearer.
Generally,
class EQ a b where
type BN a b
instance TypeEq a b bn => EQ a b where
type BN a b = bn
is really just syntactic sugar for
type family BN a b
class EQ a b
type instance BN a b = bn
instance TypeEq a b bn => EQ a b
where it is clear that 'bn' is not in scope in the rhs of the type
instance.
Unfortunately, you cannot wrap a type class constraint into a type
synonym family (independent of whether it is associated or not).
Incidentally, type equalities (which are part of the type family
implementation) enable a much more compact definition of the type
equality predicate:
data True; data False;
class EqTyP a b result
instance (result ~ True) => EqTyP a a result
instance (result ~ False) => EqTyP a b result
Manuel
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