Re: [Haskell-cafe] higher kind in parametric type

11 Jul 2018

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Am 11.07.2018 um 16:31 schrieb Frank Staals :
Olaf Klinke  writes:
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Dear cafe,
I am writing a library for parsing higher-kinded data, based on the czipwith package [1]. I ran into the following problem.
I have a type class
class Config p f | f -> p where
   f :: (* -> *) -> *
is the higher-kinded data and
   p :: * -> *
is the associated parser type.
I want to add a class member that does not mention f in its type, e.g.
heading :: p String
Naturally, this would lead to ambiguity checks to fail, as the usage of heading does not tell which Config instance to use. My usual workaround would be to wrap `heading` in a phantom type, e.g.
   data Heading f p = Heading (p String)
and give `heading` the type Heading f p. However, ghc-8.0.2 complains about f not being a type:
• Expecting one more argument to ‘f’
     Expected a type, but ‘f’ has kind ‘(* -> *) -> *’
   • In the first argument of ‘Heading’, namely ‘f’
     In the type signature:
       heading :: Heading f p
     In the class declaration for ‘Config’
Is there a restriction of the kinds that can be used in parametric types?
Cheers,
Olaf
[1] http://hackage.haskell.org/package/czipwith
I think you can just a kind signature to 'f' in your Heading
datatype. I.e. the following seems to compile/typecheck here:
{-# LANGUAGE MultiParamTypeClasses #-}
{-# LANGUAGE FunctionalDependencies #-}
{-# LANGUAGE KindSignatures #-}
{-# LANGUAGE PolyKinds #-}
newtype Heading (f :: k) (p :: * -> *) = Heading (p String)
class Config (p :: * -> *) (f :: (* -> *) -> *) | f -> p where
 foo :: Heading f p -> String
You solved it, Frank, thanks a lot! 

Actually, it seems that this line makes all the difference:
{-# LANGUAGE PolyKinds #-}

In ghc-7.4.2 my code compiles with the pragma, and yields the above error message without. Usually the compiler is kind enough to suggest adding the language extension when encountering an error. This time it didn't. Maybe this is a case for the ghc developers? 

Olaf