Hi all, I've had a curious bug report [1] for haskell-src-exts, pointing to a difference in behavior between haskell-src-exts and GHC. Digging further, it seems to me like GHC is behaving quite strange in this instance, but since we don't have formal documentation for the extensions I can't be sure. I'm *almost* convinced this is a bug in GHC, but with these type extensions I can never be quite sure. Thus I'm putting it out here in the hope that someone will either explain why it is this way, or tell me to go file a bug report. The gist of it is the following piece of code:
multipleCtx :: Eq a => Show a => a multipleCtx = undefined
GHC accepts this code, while haskell-src-exts requires parentheses around the latter part of the signature, i.e. Eq a => (Show a => a). The difference is the following productions haskell-src-exts:
ctype :: { PType } : 'forall' ktyvars '.' ctype | context '=>' type | type
GHC:
ctypedoc :: { LHsType RdrName } : 'forall' tv_bndrs '.' ctypedoc | context '=>' ctypedoc | gentypedoc
Notice GHC's recursive call to ctypedoc after the =>. I have no idea what the doc suffix on the production is intended to indicate though - and I was curious to find a separate set of rules that don't have that suffix:
ctype :: { LHsType RdrName } : 'forall' tv_bndrs '.' ctype | context '=>' type | type
This one looks just like the one that haskell-src-exts uses - type instead of ctype after the =>. So what's the difference between the two in GHC? Looking further, the former is used in top-level type signatures, while the latter is used for pretty much everything else. In particular, you can't put a ctypedoc inside parentheses, there you would have to use ctype. So while GHC accepts the above definition, it rejects e.g. the (seemingly) equivalent
multipleCtx :: (Eq a => Show a => a) multipleCtx = undefined
My guess would be that there's a bug here, and that it's the recursive call to ctypedoc that is at fault, it should really be gentypedoc. On the other hand there's no problem parsing either, so there's no technical reason not to allow chained contexts without parentheses, even though I personally think it looks quite awkward. Enough rambling - can someone make me the wiser? Cheers, /Niklas [1] http://trac.haskell.org/haskell-src-exts/ticket/37