[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > This is a "Related Work" section of the previous message. > > ... again cunning stuff omitted ... >
I buy most of this but IMHO you should make very clear that there is not just a single safeCoerce, but the TI/init_typeseq argument has to be constructed and supplied by the programmer in a way that (s)he decides what array of types can be handled. So if you wanted to use your approach to scrap boilerplate [1], say deal with many datatypes, this becomes quite a burden. Think of actually building initial type sequences. Think of how combinators need to be parameterised to take type sequences. (That's what I called a CWA yesterday.) On the other hand, you mention this duality between type classes vs. type heaps. Yes, I would say that type classes and type case are somewhat dual. You provide a type case. What I like about your type case vs. the approach taken in [1] is that your type case will be very precise. That is, you don't say one can just try anything what is Typeable but you rather restrict questions to the types in the supplied initial type sequence. This is certainly beneficial for applications other than scraping boilerplate. Ralf [1} "Scrap your boilerplate: a practical design pattern for generic programming" by Ralf Lämmel and Simon Peyton-Jones, appeared in Proceedings of TLDI 2003, ACM Press http://www.cs.vu.nl/boilerplate/#paper -- Ralf Laemmel VU & CWI, Amsterdam, The Netherlands http://www.cs.vu.nl/~ralf/ http://www.cwi.nl/~ralf/ _______________________________________________ Haskell mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell