Re: Primitive types and Prelude shenanigans

On Fri, Feb 16, 2001 at 05:13:10PM +0000, Marcin 'Qrczak' Kowalczyk wrote:

Fri, 16 Feb 2001 04:14:24 -0800, Simon Peyton-Jones pisze:

...

Here I think the right thing is to say that desugaring for boolean constructs uses a function 'if' assumed to have type if :: forall b. Bool -> b -> b -> b

What if somebody wants to make 'if' overloaded on more types than some constant type called Bool?

class Condition a where if :: a -> b -> b -> b

(Note that Hawk does almost exactly this.)

Generally I don't feel the need of allowing to replace if, Bool and everything else with custom definitions, especially when there is no single obvious way.

Why not just let if x then y else z be syntactic sugar for Prelude.ifThenElse x y z when some flag is given? That allows a Prelude hacker to do whatever she wants, from the standard ifThenElse :: Bool -> x -> x -> x ifThenElse True x _ = x ifThenElse True _ y = y to something like class (Boolean a) => Condition a b where ifThenElse :: a -> b -> b -> b ("if" is a keyword, so cannot be used as a function name. Hawk uses "mux" for this operation.) Compilers are good enough to inline the standard definition (and compile it away when appropriate), right? Pattern guards can be turned into "ifThenElse" as specified in section 3.17.3 of the Haskell Report. Or maybe there should be a separate function "evalGuard", which is ordinarily of type evalGuard :: [(Bool, a)] -> a -> a (taking the list of guards and RHS, together with the default case). It's less clear that compilers would be able to produce good code in this case. But this would have to be changed: An alternative of the form pat -> exp where decls is treated as shorthand for: pat | True -> exp where decls Best, Dylan Thurston