On 10/29/10 11:18 AM, Daniel Peebles wrote:
Speaking of MagicHash, is it really necessary to take an operator with
"potential" like (#) just to keep primitive symbols separate from the rest?
At least from my 2010 Haskell learner perspective, it seems odd to create a
whole language extension/lexical change just for that purpose.
I'm sort of torn on this issue. On the one hand (#) has great potential
as an operator, on the other hand I've found that having something like
-XMagicHash (or TeX's \makeatletter and \makeatother) can be really
helpful when you want to expose some guts but also want to keep folks
from using them accidentally.
For example, I use a lot of newtypes to enforce various well-formedness
constraints (a la weak-sigma types in dependently typed languages).
Thus, I'll often define things like
netwype Foo = Foo# Bar
and then have a smart constructor (toFoo :: Bar -> Maybe Foo) which
verifies whatever invariant.
Sometimes we may be forced to export Foo# in case other modules need to
look inside in order to create new class instances or the like, but we
don't want people using it in general since that'd violate the semantics
of the type Foo. And Foo# is much nicer to type than UnsafeFoo[1]. Since
it uses the MagicHash syntax, we can ensure that noone will use it
blithely since they must first enable an extension to eliminate the
syntax error.
So you can make some nice lemonade from those lemons, but I'm not sure
whether the lemonade is really worth eliminating every other citrus
fruit (most of which are quite tasty).
[1] In addition to toFoo, I'll often export a smart constructor
(unsafeToFoo :: Bar -> Foo) which will still test the invariants but
throws an error instead of returning Nothing. The primary use of
unsafeToFoo is to get consistent error messages when someone's going to
be throwing the Maybe away anyways. Conversely, allowing them to use
Foo# gives the same type as unsafeToFoo, but allows circumventing the
invariant checking as a performance optimization.
--
Live well,
~wren
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