Proposal: Deprecate ExistentialQuantification
Hi all, Following the discussion on the use of 'forall' and extensions that use it [1], I would hereby like to propose that the ExistentialQuantification extension is deprecated. My rationale is as follows. With the introduction of GADTs, we now have two ways to write datatype declarations, the old simple way and the GADTs way. The GADTs way fits better syntactically with Haskell's other syntactic constructs, in all ways. The general style is (somewhat simplified) keyword type 'where' decls, where keyword can in Haskell 98 be class or instance, but with GADTs also data. The old simple way of defining data types is the odd one out. It certainly has its uses though, in particular when defining some simple (but possibly large) enum-like datatype (like cabal's Extension type incidentally), then it obviously becomes tedious to have to restate the trivial type signature for each constructor. Using GADTs style syntax it is possible to allow constructors with existentially quantified arguments with *no additional syntax needed*. It follows nicely from the standard syntax for type signature declarations (assuming explicit foralls), e.g. the following normal datatype declaration data Foo = forall a . Show a = Foo a which uses ExistentialQuantification syntax, could be written as data Foo where Foo :: forall a . Show a = a - Foo which is syntactically just a normal type signature. The upside of deprecating ExistentialQuantification is thus that we keep the syntax cleaner, and we keep the old style of datatype declarations simple (as it should be, IMO). Anything fancier can use the GADTs syntax, which anyone that uses something fancier should be acquainted with anyway. The downside is that we lose one level of granularity in the type system. GADTs enables a lot more semantic possibilities for constructors than ExistentialQuantification does, and baking the latter into the former means we have no way of specifying that we *only* want to use the capabilities of ExistentialQuantification. My own take on that is that what we have now is a wart that should be removed, and that if we think that the latter is a problem then the way to go would be to split the monolithic GADTs extension into several semantic levels. There is of course also the downside that we break existing code, but that's a standard problem with improvement through deprecation which I will pay no mind. Discussion period: 2 weeks Cheers, /Niklas [1] http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/glasgow-haskell-users/2009-June/017432.html ___ Glasgow-haskell-users mailing list Glasgow-haskell-users@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/glasgow-haskell-users
Re: group keyword with TransformListComp
Hi,
I agree this is annoying. It was hard to find syntax which was both
meaningful and currently unused, so we settled on this instead. As
Simon says, suggestions are welcome!
Note that group *should* be parsed as a special id, so you can still
import D.L qualified and then use dot notation to access the function.
Cheers,
Max
2009/6/21 Neil Mitchell ndmitch...@gmail.com:
Hi,
The TransformListComp extension makes group a keyword. Unfortunately
group is a useful function, and is even in Data.List. Thus,
Data.List.group and TransformListComp are incompatible. This seems a
very painful concession to give up a nice function name for a new
extension. Is this intentional? Here's an example:
$ cat GroupKeyword.hs
{-# LANGUAGE TransformListComp #-}
module GroupKeyword where
a = map head $ group $ sort [1..100]
$ ghci GroupKeyword.hs
GHCi, version 6.10.2: http://www.haskell.org/ghc/ :? for help
Loading package ghc-prim ... linking ... done.
Loading package integer ... linking ... done.
Loading package base ... linking ... done.
[1 of 1] Compiling GroupKeyword ( GroupKeyword.hs, interpreted )
GroupKeyword.hs:4:15: parse error on input `group'
Failed, modules loaded: none.
Prelude
There are some places I'd like to use TransformListComp, but I often
want to use group in the same module.
Thanks
Neil
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Re: Proposal: Deprecate ExistentialQuantification
On Sat, Jun 27, 2009 at 5:44 AM, Niklas Brobergniklas.brob...@gmail.com wrote: Hi all, Following the discussion on the use of 'forall' and extensions that use it [1], I would hereby like to propose that the ExistentialQuantification extension is deprecated. My rationale is as follows. With the introduction of GADTs, we now have two ways to write datatype declarations, the old simple way and the GADTs way. The GADTs way fits better syntactically with Haskell's other syntactic constructs, in all ways. The general style is (somewhat simplified) keyword type 'where' decls, where keyword can in Haskell 98 be class or instance, but with GADTs also data. The old simple way of defining data types is the odd one out. It certainly has its uses though, in particular when defining some simple (but possibly large) enum-like datatype (like cabal's Extension type incidentally), then it obviously becomes tedious to have to restate the trivial type signature for each constructor. How does the support of the extensions differ between existing implementations? Antoine ___ Glasgow-haskell-users mailing list Glasgow-haskell-users@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/glasgow-haskell-users
Re: Proposal: Deprecate ExistentialQuantification
Niklas Broberg wrote: data Foo = forall a . Show a = Foo a which uses ExistentialQuantification syntax, could be written as data Foo where Foo :: forall a . Show a = a - Foo The downside is that we lose one level of granularity in the type system. GADTs enables a lot more semantic possibilities for constructors than ExistentialQuantification does, and baking the latter into the former means we have no way of specifying that we *only* want to use the capabilities of ExistentialQuantification. Is it easy algorithmically to look at a GADT and decide whether it has only ExistentialQuantification features? After all, IIRC, hugs and nhc support ExistentialQuantification but their type systems might not be up to the full generality of GADTs. (GHC's wasn't even quite up to it for quite a long time until around 6.8, when we finally got it right.) -Isaac ___ Glasgow-haskell-users mailing list Glasgow-haskell-users@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/glasgow-haskell-users
Re: Proposal: Deprecate ExistentialQuantification
I would hereby like to propose that the ExistentialQuantification extension is deprecated. It is worth pointing out that all current Haskell implementations (to my knowledge) have ExistentialQuantification, whilst there is only one Haskell implementation that has the proposed replacement feature, GADTs. Of course, that in itself is not an argument to avoid desirable change to the language, but it is one factor to consider. Regards, Malcolm ___ Glasgow-haskell-users mailing list Glasgow-haskell-users@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/glasgow-haskell-users
Re: Proposal: Deprecate ExistentialQuantification
I would hereby like to propose that the ExistentialQuantification extension is deprecated. It is worth pointing out that all current Haskell implementations (to my knowledge) have ExistentialQuantification, whilst there is only one Haskell implementation that has the proposed replacement feature, GADTs. Of course, that in itself is not an argument to avoid desirable change to the language, but it is one factor to consider. The tongue-in-cheek response is that it should be a factor to consider only for how long a deprecation period we want... ;-) Seriously though, it's of course a consideration that should be made. It also ties back to the problem of the monolithic GADTs extension, which isn't trivial to implement in other tools - but the ExistentialQuantification *subset* of GADTs should be easy, for any implementation that already supports the current ExistentialQuantification extension, since then it's just a syntactic issue. So might as well bite that bullet then, what if we did the following split, in the spirit of the various increasing power of the extensions that enable forall-quantified types ((ExplicitForall =) PolymorphicComponents = Rank2Types = RankNTypes): * NewConstructorSyntax: Lets the programmer write data types using the GADTs *syntax*, but doesn't add any type-level power (and no forall syntax). Could probably use a better name (bikeshed warning). * ExistentialQuantification: Implies NewConstructorSyntax (and ExplicitForall). Let's the programmer use existentially quantified arguments to constructors when using the GADTs syntax. Still requires all constructors to have the same type, which is the one given in the header. * GADTs: Implies ExistentialQuantification. Let's the programmer use the full type-level power of GADTs. It might make sense to merge NewConstructorSyntax and ExistentialQuantification, though I'm not sure naming that merge ExistentialQuantification would be accurate (naming is the bikeshed though). Personally I would prefer the full 3-way split, to keep a clean separation between syntactic and semantic extensions, but it's a rather weak preference. If we had something like this split, implementations that already support ExistentialQuantification at the type level would only need to change their parsers in a simple way (nothing hard, trust me), and add what should be a simple check that the constructors all have the declared type. Would that be preferable? Cheers, /Niklas ___ Glasgow-haskell-users mailing list Glasgow-haskell-users@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/glasgow-haskell-users
Re: Proposal: Deprecate ExistentialQuantification
On Jun 27, 2009, at 15:37 , Niklas Broberg wrote: * NewConstructorSyntax: Lets the programmer write data types using the GADTs *syntax*, but doesn't add any type-level power (and no forall syntax). Could probably use a better name (bikeshed warning). GeneralizedTypeSyntax occurs to me. -- brandon s. allbery [solaris,freebsd,perl,pugs,haskell] allb...@kf8nh.com system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] allb...@ece.cmu.edu electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon universityKF8NH PGP.sig Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ Glasgow-haskell-users mailing list Glasgow-haskell-users@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/glasgow-haskell-users
