On Sun, Sep 2, 2012 at 9:40 AM,
The thing is, that one ALWAYS wants to create a union of types, and not merely an ad-hock list of data declarations. So why does it take more code to do "the right thing(tm)" than to do "the wrong thing(r)"?
You've said this a few times, that you run into this constantly, or even that everyone runs into this. But I don't think that's the case. It's something that happens sometimes, yes, but if you're running into this issue for every data type that you declare, that is certainly NOT just normal in Haskell programming. So in that sense, many of the answers you've gotten - to use a GADT, in particular - might be great advice in the small subset of cases where average Haskell programmers want more complex constraints on types; but it's certainly not a good idea to do to every data type in your application. I don't have the answer for you about why this always happens to you, but it's clear that there's something there - perhaps a stylistic issue, or a domain-specific pattern, or something... - that's causing you to face this a lot more frequently than others do. If I had to take a guess, I'd say that you're breaking things down into fairly complex monolithic parts, where a lot of Haskell programmers will have a tendency to work with simpler types and break things down into smaller pieces. But... who knows... I haven't seen the many cases where this has happened to you. -- Chris