
9 Feb
2006
9 Feb
'06
8:19 a.m.
| There has been a suggestion that the 'deriving' mechanism be de-coupled | from the datatype declaration. Together with a generic default | definition, that means you could write something like | | deriving Bin for (,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,) | | and hence not need to write the tedious instance header yourself, | since the compiler can easily infer it. Yes -- a couple of times I've nearly gotten down to implementing this. Given that we have the deriving mechanism at all, we might as well make it a bit more useful. The only real obstacle is defining a suitable syntax. It makes the language bigger, but not in a deep way. Simon