On 12/17/07, Wolfgang Jeltsch
This is not a generalization of what you talked about. Why should the tuple type be unboxed? Tuple types are boxed, meaning there is a difference between _|_ and (_|_,…,_|_). If you write
newtype X = X (A, B, C)
then X doesn't add another level of indirection but the level of indirection introduced by the tuple constructor remains, of course. So you could write the above newtype declaration instead of
data X = X A B C.
I interpreted Evan's question as "why can't you have newtypes with multiple fields?" -- i.e., newtype X = X A B C -- and that's the question I was answering. But maybe I misunderstood. Cheers, Tim -- Tim Chevalier * catamorphism.org * Often in error, never in doubt "After three days without programming, life becomes meaningless." -- James Geoffrey