Towards open type functions for Haskell
- Tom Schrijvers ,
- Martin Sulzmann ,
- Simon Peyton Jones ,
- Manuel Chakravarty
Presented at the Implementing Functional Languages workshop, Sept 2007 (IFL07), but not part of its post-refereed proceedings.
We report on an extension of Haskell with type(-level) functions and equality constraints. We illustrate their usefulness in the context of phantom types, GADTs and type classes. Problems in the context of type checking are identified and we sketch our solution: a decidable type checking algorithm for a restricted class of type functions. Moreover, functional dependencies are now obsolete: we show how they can be encoded as type functions.