Re: [Haskell-cafe] type families and type signatures

["Lennart Augustsson"]

On Wed, Apr 9, 2008 at 8:53 AM, Martin Sulzmann <martin.sulzmann@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Lennart, you said

(It's also pretty easy to fix the problem.)

What do you mean? Easy to fix the type checker, or easy to fix the program by inserting annotations
to guide the type checker?

Martin

 

I'm referring to the situation where the type inferred by the type checker is illegal for me to put into the program.
In our example we can fix this in two ways, by making foo' illegal even when it has no signature, or making foo' legal even when it has a signature.

To make it illegal:  If foo' has no type signature, infer a type for foo', insert this type as a signature and type check again.  If this fails, foo' is illegal.

To make it legal: If foo' with a type signature doesn't type check, try to infer a type without a signature.  If this succeeds then check that the type that was inferred is alpha-convertible to the original signature.  If it is, accept foo'; the signature doesn't add any information.

Either of these two option would be much preferable to the current (broken) situation where the inferred signature is illegal.

  -- Lennart

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