Difference between revisions of "GHC/Type system/PolyKinds"
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GHC 7.6 introduced kind polymorphism and data kinds for the first time. This page contains notes (currently rather random) about how to use these features. | GHC 7.6 introduced kind polymorphism and data kinds for the first time. This page contains notes (currently rather random) about how to use these features. | ||
| − | * | + | * {{GHCUsersGuide|exts/poly_kinds||a section on Kind Polymorphism}}. {{GHCUsersGuide|exts/data_kinds||another section on data-type promotion.}} |
* [http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/dimitris/fc-kind-poly.pdf Giving Haskell a promotion], the paper about it. | * [http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/dimitris/fc-kind-poly.pdf Giving Haskell a promotion], the paper about it. | ||
Revision as of 23:31, 24 July 2021
Kind polymorphism
GHC 7.6 introduced kind polymorphism and data kinds for the first time. This page contains notes (currently rather random) about how to use these features.
- The GHC Users Guide has a section on Kind Polymorphism.. The GHC Users Guide has another section on data-type promotion..
- Giving Haskell a promotion, the paper about it.
Syntactic ambiguity for lists
Suppose Proxy :: forall k. k -> *, and consider
Proxy [Int]
Proxy [Int,Bool]
The former must mean what it always means in Haskell, namely
Proxy * (List Int)
where I'm writing the kind argument explicitly. To be fully clear, I'm writing List for the type constructor for lists (written [] in Haskell), so (List Int) is a type of kind *.
But Proxy [Int,Bool] can only mean Proxy applied to a list of types, thus:
Proxy [*] (Cons * Int (Cont * Bool (Nil *)))
Now we can see that Proxy [Int] is ambiguous. It could also mean
Proxy [*] (Cons * Int (Nil *))
but we choose the normal meaning to avoid screwing up Haskell programs. To get the above form we have to quote the "[", thus
Proxy '[ Int ]
In short, singleton lists (and indeed the empty list) must be explicitly promoted with a quote, whereas for type-level lists of two or more elements you don't need an explicit promotion quote.