Thomas Conway wrote:
I'm having some difficulty with typeclasses.
What I'm trying to do should be obvious, but it's still giving me trouble. I want to take a packaged item, and strengthen the constraints on its type. Rather than being just any type that is an instance of A, I want to do a runtime check and do something different if it is a type that is also an instance of B (which implies that it is an instance of A also).
It is not possible to check at run time, whether an instance of some class is available for a given value. If a constraint is not mentioned at compile time, the dictionary for that constraint will not be included at run time, so there will be nowhere to get it from (unlike in Java, where every object "carries" along all the dictionaries that it implements). Having said that there is a hack/technique that I am using myself - maybe it will help you. It simulates something similar to what Java does. I rewrote your program to use it - result attached here. The idea is to have an existential box for each class so that this box carries the dictionary at run time. We call such a box an "interface" and provide for our values a runtime list of interfaces that they implement. This list is available as a function of the Interfaced class. You might also look at the paper "Scrap your boilerplate with class: extensible generic functions" by Ralf Lämmel and Simon Peyton-Jones. Among other things they describe existential boxes that can be parametrized with the context that they carry. Cheers, Misha