Dan Doel wrote:
On Sunday 19 April 2009 4:56:29 pm wren ng thornton wrote:
> Bulat Ziganshin wrote:
> > Hello R.A.,
> >
> > Sunday, April 19, 2009, 11:46:53 PM, you wrote:
> > > Does anybody know if there are any plans to incorporate some of
> > > these extensions into GHC - specifically the existential typing ?
> >
> > it is already here, but you should use "forall" keyword instead odf
> > "exists"
>
> More particularly, enable Rank2Types and then for any type lambda F and
> for any type Y which does not capture @a@:
>
> (x :: exists a. F a) ==> (x :: forall a. F a)
>
> (f :: exists a. (F a -> Y)) ==> (f :: (forall a. F a) -> Y)
Eh? I don't think this is right, at least not precisely. The first is
certainly not correct, because
exists a. F a
is F A for some hidden A, whereas
forall a. F a
can be instantiated to any concrete F A.
Yes, however, because consumers (e.g. @f@) demand that their arguments
remain polymorphic, anything which reduces the polymorphism of @a@ in
@x@ will make it ineligible for being passed to consumers. Maybe not
precise, but it works.
Another take is to use (x :: forall a. () -> F a) and then once you pass
() in then the return value is "for some @a@". It's easy to see that
this is the same as the version above.
A higher rank encoding of this
existential would be:
forall r. (forall a. F a -> r) -> r
encoding the existential as its universal eliminator, similar to encoding an
inductive type by its corresponding fold.
Exactly. Whether you pass a polymorphic function to an eliminator (as I
had), or pass the universal eliminator to an applicator (as you're
suggesting) isn't really important, it's just type lifting:
(x :: forall a. F a) ==> (x :: forall r. (forall a. F a -> r) -> r)
(f :: (forall a. F a) -> Y) ==> (f :: ((forall a. F a -> Y) -> Y) -> Y))
The type lifted version is more precise in the sense that it
distinguishes polymorphic values from existential values (rather than
overloading the sense of polymorphism), but I don't think it's more
correct in any deep way.
What you can do in GHC is create existentially quantified data types, like so:
data E f = forall a. E (f a)
Then E F is roughly equivalent to (exists a. F a).
But only roughly. E F has extra bottoms which distinguish it from
(exists a. F a), which can be of real interest.
--
Live well,
~wren
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