On Sat, Dec 17, 2011 at 01:37:35PM -0500, Daniel Peebles wrote:
> I noticed that the ZipList newtype in Control.Applicative has no derived
> instances at all. We can't show a ZipList, check it for equality, or do
> anything to it except unpack it or treat it like an Applicative or Functor.
>
> It seems fairly uncontroversial to suggest adding some instances for it,
> but there are some minor questions to address: the obvious instances to add
> might be Eq, Ord, Show, Read, and possibly Typeable and/or Data. Are there
> any others I've missed? For the Read/Show instances, do we want manual ones
> that don't use the verbose record-style output? Since it's just defined as
> data ZipList a = ZipList { getZipList :: [a] } to get an easy accessor
> (does anyone actually use getZipList as a field for record updates?), it
> might be easier to write the projection manually and change the definition
> to data ZipList a = ZipList [a] with a separate getZipList function, so the
> deriving mechanism can give us a less noisy Show instance.