Hi,

Ryan Newton wrote:

It is very hard for me to
see why people should be able to make their own Generic instances (that
might lie about the structure of the type), in Safe-Haskell.

I guess that lying Generics instances might arise because of software evolution. Let's say we start with an abstract data type of binary trees.

  module Tree (Tree, node, empty, null, split) where
    data Tree a = Node (Tree a) (Tree a) | Empty
      deriving Generics

    node = Node

    empty = Empty

    null Empty = True
    null _ = False

    split (Node a b) = (a, b)

    size Empty = 0
    size (Node x y) = size x + size y

Note that this data type is not really abstract, because we export the Generics instance, so clients of this module can learn about the implementation of Tree. This is not a big deal, because the chosen implementation happens to correspond to the abstract structure of binary trees anyway. So I would expect that generic code will work fine. For example, you could use generic read and show functions to serialize trees, and get a reasonable data format.

Now, we want to evolve our module by caching the size of trees. We do something like this:

  module Tree (Tree, node, empty, null, split) where
    data Tree a = Tree !Int (RealTree a)

    data RealTree a = Node (Tree a) (Tree a) | Empty

    tree (Node a b) = Tree (size a + size b) t
    tree Empty = Tree 0 Empty

    node x y = tree (Node x y)

    empty = tree Empty

    null (Tree _ Empty) = True
    null _ = False

    split (Tree _ (Node a b)) = (a, b)

    size (Tree n _) = n

Except for the Generics instance, we provide the exact same interface and behavior to our clients, we just traded some space for performance. But what Generics instance should we provide? If we just add "deriving Generics" to the two datatypes, we leak the change of representation to our clients. For example, a client that serialized a tree with a generic show function based on the old Tree cannot hope to deserialize it back with a generic read function based on the new Tree. The size information would be missing, and the structure would be different.

If we write a Generics instance by hand, however, I guess we can make it present the exact same structure as the derived Generics instance for the old Tree. With this lying instance, the generic read function will happily deserialize the old data. The size will be computed on the fly, because our hand-written Generics instance will introduce calls to our smart constructors.

  Tillmann
_______________________________________________
Haskell-Cafe mailing list
Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org
http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe