New subject: Consistency issue with type level numeric literals

28 Dec 2013

      GHC 7.6.3 has quite convenient type-level numeric literals. We can use
numbers like 1 and 2 in types. However, using the type level numeral
has been quite a bit of a challenge, illustrated, for example, by 
the following SO question.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/20809998/type-level-nats-with-literals-an...

It seems the challenge has the reason: the type level numerals and
their operations provided in GHC.TypeLits have a consistency
issue. The following code demonstrates the issue: it constructs two
distinct values of the type Sing 2. Singletons aren't singletons.

{-# LANGUAGE KindSignatures #-}
{-# LANGUAGE DataKinds #-}
{-# LANGUAGE ScopedTypeVariables #-}
{-# LANGUAGE TypeOperators #-}
{-# LANGUAGE TypeFamilies #-}
{-# LANGUAGE GADTs #-}
{-# LANGUAGE PolyKinds #-}

module NotSing where

import GHC.TypeLits

-- GHC strangely enough lets us define instances for (+)
type instance 1 + 1 = 0
type instance 0 + 1 = 2

-- A singular representative of 1::Nat
s1 :: Sing 1
s1 = withSing id

-- A singular representative of 2::Nat
s2 :: Sing 2
s2 = withSing id

is2 :: IsZero 0
is2 = IsSucc s1

tran :: IsZero 0 -> Sing 2
tran (IsSucc x) = case isZero x of
                   IsSucc y -> case isZero y of
                                IsZero -> x

-- Another singular representative of 2::Nat
-- A singular representative of 2::Nat
s2' :: Sing 2
s2' = tran is2

{-
*NotSing> s2
2
*NotSing> s2'
1
-}

Consistency issue with type level numeric literals

oleg＠okmij.org

Iavor Diatchki

Simon Peyton-Jones

Iavor Diatchki

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