Job Vranish wrote:
I think that in an ideal world haskell would have some way of allowing infinite types if you asked for them explicitly (say in the type signature somehow) and then just automatically wrap/unwrap everything with newtypes behind the scenes (well maybe in an ideal world it wouldn't have to do this either). This wouldn't change the underlying semantics, but would get rid of alot of messyness.
Infinite types are possible, My toy language infers infinite types just fine :) and I think Ocaml has an option for them, but niether of those have type classes so I'm not sure how compatable the idea is with haskell in general.
There was a thread with a compelling reason against vanilla infinite types some time ago: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/17103 Of course, you can have all the recursion you want by using newtype , it's just that you need to annotate them with the extraneous constructor. In fact, that's exactly the purpose of the constructor; think of it as an aid for the type checker. Regards, apfelmus -- http://apfelmus.nfshost.com