[Haskell-cafe] Spurious pattern match warnings with GADTs

12 Jan 2012

      Let's say I have:

data T0
data T1

data T a where
  A :: T T0
  B :: T T1

Then I can write the following without getting any non-exhaustive
pattern match warnings:

t :: T T0 -> String
t a = case a of
  A -> "A"

However, if I use type classes to constrain the constructors, instead
of using the phantom types directly:

class C0 a
instance C0 T0

class C1 a
instance C1 T1

data T a where
  A :: C0 a => T a
  B :: C1 a => T a

Then I get a non-exhaustive pattern match warning on 't'.  How come?
(I'm using GHC 7.0.4)

It appears that the intelligent pattern analysis of the first example
is a relatively recent addition [1].

-Tom

[1] http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/3476

Tom Hawkins