You're right. The list syntax is only for lists in Haskell. It would be nice if the list syntax was overloaded too. You can overload numeric literals (by defining fromInteger) and string literals (by defining fromString, in 6.7). BTW, the [1..10] syntax is overloaded, you need an Enum instance.
-- Lennart On 9/2/07, Peter Verswyvelen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Chaddaï Fouché wrote: > > You can indeed already do that, except it won't be a single instance > > since list have a bucketful of interesting properties. A good starting > > is looking at what list is an instance of and trying to identify the > > set of instance which interest us in this case, Foldable and Functor > > are probably a good start, embodying most of the interesting way to > > access a data structure as a list (head and tail don't really make > > sense for most of the alternatives, except other "sequence" library > > which currently provide this functionality in an ad-hoc way, see > > Sequence and ByteString for example of that). > > An alternative is Traversable. > Thanks! > > But before digging into this, maybe I should rephrase myself by giving a > more specific (although useless) example of what I mean. > > When I write: > > data Foo = Foo Int Int deriving (Show,Eq) > > instance Num Foo where > fromInteger x = Foo x' x' where x' = fromInteger x > _ + _ = error "Not relevant for example" > _ * _ = error "Not relevant for example" > abs _ = error "Not relevant for example" > signum _ = error "Not relevant for example" > > x = 42::Foo > > I don't have to apply the Foo data constructor to lift the number 42 > because I guess the compiler has builtin support for calling fromInteger > (or fromRational). I even don't have to add the type annotation most of > the time when the compiler can infer the type needed, which is very > cool, sometimes a bit annoying. > > However, now I try the same for lists > > data Bar = Bar [Int] [Int] > > -- A List type class does not exist, so this cannot work > instance List Bar where > fromList x = Bar x x > > -- This does not work > y = [1..10]::Bar > > So the only way to do this, is to create a constructor function like > > bar x = Bar x x > > which means the usage of lists in Haskell is not as general as numbers, > in the sense one cannot take advantage of the builtin syntactic sugar of > lists like > > [x,y,z] := x : (y : (z : [])) > > So if I would like to use this compact notation for e.g. creating a Set > datatype, I would have to create special constructor functions (fromList > or mkSet or whatever) > > Is this correct? If so, I'm sure a good reason must exist for this :) > > Thanks, > Peter > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > Haskell-Cafe mailing list > Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org > http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe >
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