Re: Proposal: Add &&& and *** to Data.Tuple

17 Sep 2007

      On Mon, Sep 17, 2007 at 07:47:33PM +0100, Jon Fairbairn wrote:
...
Ian Lynagh  writes:
...
On Mon, Sep 17, 2007 at 03:23:46PM +0200, Josef Svenningsson wrote:
...
It is becoming increasingly popular to import Control.Arrow just to
get access to the functions &&& and *** specialized to the function
arrow. I propose to add the specialized version of these two functions
I think that having the same function with different types is likely to
cause user confusion, and also ambiguous function errors.
(I also think that using a different name for the specialised versions
would be a bad idea.)
This seems to be a recurrent problem, and I keep wondering
whether there might not be a general solution along the
lines of declaring that an instance of a class at a
particular type subsumes the functions declared with those
names at the specialised type.
An interesting idea; I'm not sure, but I think it might help us have
code in the logical place in the base library without import loops.

The only ugliness I see is that if I have

    module I where
        x :: Int
        x = 5

    module B where
        x :: Bool
        x = True

    module C where
        import I
        import B

        class C a where
            x :: a

        instance C Int where
            x subsumes I.x

        instance C Bool where
            x subsumes B.x

then importing I and B but not C could lead to confusion and ambiguity.

Thanks
Ian