Hi Simon,

On Fri, Sep 23, 2011 at 10:04, Simon Peyton-Jones wrote:

I did this.

*TF> :kind F Int

F Int :: *

*TF> :kind! F Int

F Int :: *

= Bool

In the end I just made an eager version of :kind as the command: in addition to displaying the kind of the type, it normalises it and shows the result.

It’s in HEAD. Documentation to come when I get home.

That's great! Much appreciated.

I’m not wedded to this command name. If everyone wants “:normalise” it would only take a 1-line change.

I'm also not picky about the name. But I do think fewer keystrokes are better. I guess with ":kind!" you have have to type at least ':', 'k', '\t', and '!', whereas with a unique first character such as 'n', you only have to type ':', 'n' [1]. But that's the only real "concern" I would have about the name.

Safe travels!

Regards,

Sean

[1] This presupposes that people actually want to use such a command. It does make working with type families easier. And, now that I think about it, I needed something like that this several years ago. http://splonderzoek.blogspot.com/2009/06/rfc-extensible-typed-scanf-and-printf.html