Hello Wolfgang, Friday, February 03, 2006, 2:22:17 AM, you wrote:
1) significantly simplifies declarations using typeclasses. i was seriously bitten by those huge declarations, and think that simplification in this area will lead to much wider use of type classes by the ordibary users (like me :) .
WJ> "Simple" doesn't necessarily mean "small". In my opinion, your smaller type WJ> declarations are confusing since they mix up classes and types. Classes and WJ> types are two totally different things. A class corresponds to a set of WJ> types, not to a single type, and a class has methods which a type has not. type have the same methods, they are just not expressed directly. are you know history of Array -> IArray change? functions "(!)", "bounds" and so on in magic way round to class methods. if my idea was incorporated in Haskell, this change don't require even changing signatures of most functions working with arrays - just Array type become Array interface, what a much difference? Now i'm trying to generalize my functions parameters/results to type classes instead of single types. for example, getFileSize function can return any numeric value, be it Integer, Word or Int64. This, naturally, results in those long and awkward signatures. Allowing to write type of result as just "Integral" makes signature smaller and more understandable for me: getFileSize :: Stream Monad h -> Monad Integral -- Best regards, Bulat mailto:bulatz@HotPOP.com