Thanks very much for that clear reply Michael.
I don't have an application in mind specifically, the example function
groupConsecutive just came up in another message and set me wondering:
if I have a function to work on types of class A, but types that are
instances of both class A and class B are problematic, is there a way to
distinguish the cases? As you say, it's probably not class A that I want
my function to work over, but instead my own type class.
Graham
On 15 Jan 2017 14:09, "Michael Orlitzky" mailto:michael@orlitzky.com> wrote:
On 01/14/2017 02:35 AM, Graham Gill wrote:
>
> Do I need two different versions of f, one for Bounded a and one for
> non-Bounded a? Is there a more elegant way to take care of this
problem?
> I don't know much about all of the type magic available in GHC.
>
You probably want your own typeclass instead of Enum, even if it means
generating a bunch of very boring instances of it for the types you want
"f" to work on.
The fact that "pred" should throw a runtime error on "minBound" is a
documented fact of the Enum typeclass, and you should stay far far away
from such things in your own code. Besides that, there's a weird
interaction between the semantic meaning of Enum and Bounded. For
example, here's a perfectly valid enumeration of boolean values:
True, False, True, False, ...
In your case it would be fine to have (pred False) == True, but instead
you get a runtime error thanks to the Bounded instance. So being Bounded
rules out some otherwise valid (and fine for your purposes) Enum
instances.
Your "f" should also work on a singleton type:
ghci> data Foo = Foo deriving (Eq,Show)
ghci> instance Enum Foo where toEnum _ = Foo; fromEnum _ = 0;
ghci> groupConsecutive [Foo,Foo,Foo,Foo]
[[Foo,Foo,Foo,Foo]]
But any Bounded instance for Foo would mess that up. Basically, the
pre-existing Enum instances aren't exactly what you want.
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