Type patterns in Haskell

Posted by finnsson on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by finnsson
Published on 2010-04-18T09:20:57Z Indexed on 2010/04/18 9:23 UTC
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I'm trying to compile a simple example of generic classes / type patterns (see http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/html/users_guide/generic-classes.html) in Haskell but it won't compile. Any ideas about what's wrong with the code would be helpful.

According to the documentation there should be a module Generics with the data types Unit, :*:, and :+: but ghc (6.12.1) complaints about Not in scope: data constructor 'Unit' etc.

It seems like there's a package instant-generics with the data types :*:, :+: and U but when I import that module (instead of Generics) I get the error

Illegal type pattern in the generic bindings
    {myPrint _ = ""}

The complete source code is

import Generics.Instant

class MyPrint a where
  myPrint :: a -> String

  myPrint {| U |} _ = "" 
  myPrint {| a :*: b |} (x :*: y) = "" (show x) ++ ":*:" ++ (show y)
  myPrint {| a :+: b |} _ = ""


data Foo = Foo String

instance MyPrint a => MyPrint a

main = myPrint $ Foo "hi"

and I compile it using

ghc --make Foo.hs -fglasgow-exts -XGenerics -XUndecidableInstances

P.S. The module Generics export no data types, only the functions:

canDoGenerics
mkGenericRhs
mkTyConGenericBinds
validGenericInstanceType
validGenericMethodType

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