I'd have to say that there is one(and only one) issue in Haskell that bugs me to the point where I start to think it's a design flaw: It's much easier to type things over generally than it is to type things correctly. Say we have a
data BadFoo = BadBar{ badFoo::Int} | BadFrog{ badFrog::String, badChicken::Int}
This is fine, until we want to write a function that acts on Frogs but not on Bars. The best we can do is throw a runtime error when passed a Bar and not a Foo:
deBadFrog :: BadFoo -> String deBadFrog (BadFrog s _) = s deBadFrog BadBar{} = error "Error: This is not a frog."
We cannot type our function such that it only takes Frogs and not Bars. This makes what should be a trivial compile time error into a nasty runtime one :( The only solution I have found to this is a rather ugly one:
data Foo = Bar BarT | Frog FrogT
If I then create new types for each data constructor.
data FrogT = FrogT{ frog::String, chicken::Int}
data BarT = BarT{ foo :: Int}
Then I can type deFrog correctly.
deFrog :: FrogT -> String deFrog (FrogT s _) = s
But it costs us much more code to do it correctly. I've never seen it done correctly. It's just too ugly to do it right :/ and for no good reason. It seems to me, that it was a design mistake to make data constructors and types as different entities and this is not something I know how to fix easily with the number of lines of Haskell code in existence today :/
main = do frog <- return (Frog (FrogT "Frog" 42)) print $ case frog of (Frog myFrog) -> deFrog myFrog badFrog <- return (BadBar 4) print $ case badFrog of (notAFrog@BadBar{}) -> deBadFrog notAFrog
The ease with which we make bad design choices and write bad code(in this particular case) is tragically astounding. Any suggestions on how the right way could be written more cleanly are very welcome! Timothy Hobbs