Thats a bit farther down the rabbit hole than the concern in question,
though certainly related.
An example of what you could write with polymorphic kinds, inventing a
notation for polymorphic kind variables using 'x to denote a polymorphic
kind x, which could subtitute in for a kind k = * | ** | k -> k | ...
type Id (f :: 'k) = f
type Const (a :: 'a) (b :: 'b) = a
data True
data False
type family If c (x :: 'k) (y :: 'k) :: 'k
type instance If True x y = x
type instance If False x y = y
then you could safely apply Id and If types of different kinds.
class Container x where
type Elem x :: *
type SearchOffersMultipleResults x :: *
search :: x -> SearchResult x
type SearchResult x = (If (SearchOffersMultipleResults x) [] Maybe) (Elem
x)
instance Container (SomeContainer a) where
type Elem (SomeContainer a) = a
type SearchOffersMultipleResults (SomeContainer a) = True
I suppose once down this slippery slope you might consider classes that are
parameterized on types with polymorphic kinds as well, but I definitely
wouldn't start there. ;)
-Edward
On Mon, Mar 30, 2009 at 2:54 PM, John Van Enk
I suppose having a good description of what I'd like to do might help: I'd like to be able to make an N-Tuple an instance of a type class.
class Foo a where ....
instance Foo (,) where ....
instance Foo (,,) where .... The different kindedness of (,) and (,,) prevent this from working.
/jve
On Mon, Mar 30, 2009 at 2:00 PM, Martijn van Steenbergen < martijn@van.steenbergen.nl> wrote:
John Van Enk wrote:
Haskell not having 'polymorphic kinds'. Is there a good description of why Haskell doesn't have polymorphic kinds?
IANA expert but polymorphic kinds belong to a set of reasonably new influences (e.g. from dependently typed programming languages and generic programming) and they haven't been 1) polished enough to be a widely accepted standard or 2) simply haven't been implemented yet (low priority, etc).
Besides that, I sometimes see polymorphic kinds in GHC error messages, so I suspect that at least parts of GHC already support them.
Martijn.
-- /jve