This post is an exploration of a generic technique to effectively circumvent return type polymorphism in Haskell programs using GADTs and existential quantification.

This was already featured in the Weekly News a couple of weeks back, but I think maybe it deserves it’s own thread. I’ve tried to explain this approach to some people before, but I think this article does a much better job than I have.

I do think the “Defeating” in the title might be a little bit negative, it’s have preferred something neutral like “When your result type depends on your argument values”, but it’s still something useful to know from retaining your type safety.

This existentials and GADTs can be converted into a CPS style without type equality constraints (usually, with enough work) so that you can start from this description but use it in languages with less sophisticated type systems – as long as they have parametricity – like Haskell 2010.

  • @bss03OP
    2•8 months ago

    Parsing function can return any of the types, we don’t know what was in the bytestring. So we’d need to deal with all variations in any case, no?

    Yes, the parsing function could return anything, but that’s not the exclusive source of values of the GADT.

    So, yes, when consuming the output of the parsing function, you have to deal with all the variations. But, when you have types that reflect some information is known about the type index, you only have to deal with the matching constructors.

    This is particularly important given the copy-paste transport of code from one context to another. You might have some code that works for a MyGADT MyType and doesn’t handle all the constructors. But, when you transport that code elsewhere and ask it to handle a MyGADT a, the type system will correctly warn you that you haven’t handled all the cases. This is an improvement over writing something like case x of { Right y -> stuff y; Left{} -> error "Can't happen; won't happen"; }, since I’m sure works fine in the right context, but doesn’t have a type that reflects what the programmer knows about x so if it is transported to a context where that information/assumption is no longer true, that’s only discovered at runtime. (This isn’t the best example, but it’s what I have for you.)

    • lukewarm
      2•8 months ago

      Well, I guess that I can see the value… Leaving copy-pasting problem aside, you might, for instance, want to have a type for a message with moderately complex envelope and a wide variety of possible payload types. It would be useful to have functions that act on the envelope, and treat payload as something opaque.

      Thanks for the conversation!