[Haskell-cafe] Playing with OverloadedLabels in GHC 8 RC2, how to do this?

23 Feb 2016

      Hi all, 

I'm playing with the OverloadedLabels extension in GHC 8 RC2. I have been 
able to define simple record accessors, like in this 
gist: https://gist.github.com/danidiaz/3b9a6865686c777f328c

After realizing than with OverloadedLabels a single symbol can be used to 
extract two different types from the same record, I tried to define an 
instance that says: "if a symbol can be used to extract an string from my 
record, then it can also be used to extract that a Text value".

Here's my attempt (using a dummy Text type):

{-# LANGUAGE OverloadedLabels #-}
{-# LANGUAGE DataKinds #-}
{-# LANGUAGE FlexibleInstances #-}
{-# LANGUAGE FlexibleContexts #-}
{-# LANGUAGE UndecidableInstances #-}
{-# LANGUAGE MultiParamTypeClasses #-}
{-# LANGUAGE MagicHash #-}
module Main where

import GHC.OverloadedLabels
import GHC.Prim

newtype Text = Text { getText :: String } deriving Show 

data Person = Person { _id :: Int ,  _name :: String }

instance IsLabel "name" (Person -> String) where
    fromLabel _ =  _name

instance IsLabel symbol (Person -> String) => IsLabel symbol (Person -> 
Text) where
    fromLabel _ =  Text . fromLabel (proxy# :: (Proxy# (Person -> String))) 

person :: Person
person = Person 123 "Horace"

main :: IO ()
main = do
    print (#name person :: String)
    print (#name person :: Text)

Bu this doesn't work. The error I get is puzzling:

    • Expected kind ‘Proxy# ((->) Person String)’,
        but ‘proxy# :: Proxy# (Person -> String)’ has kind ‘Proxy# (Person 
-> String)’
    • In the first argument of ‘fromLabel’, namely
        ‘(proxy# :: Proxy# (Person -> String))’

Is this a bug? What is going on here?

[Haskell-cafe] Playing with OverloadedLabels in GHC 8 RC2, how to do this?

Daniel Díaz