This question is related to this one, where I wanted to avoid the boilerplate of extracting an Id
value from a data structure, but in a type-safe manner.
I'll repeat the relevant details of the problem here: suppose you have a type Id
:
newtype Id = Id { _id :: Int }
And you want to define a function getId
that extracts this Id
from any structure that contains at least one Id
value:
class Identifiable e where
getId :: e -> Id
Now the problem is how to define such a class in a type-safe manner, while at the same time avoiding the boilerplate using Generics.
In my previous question I was pointed to type families, and in particular to the ideas described in this blog post. As far as I understand the idea is to define a type-class MkIdentifiable
such that:
class MakeIdentifiable (res :: Res) e where
mkGetId :: Proxy res -> e -> Id
Where a value is of type Res
only if there is at least one Id
value that is nested inside of it:
data Crumbs = Here | L Crumbs | R Crumbs
data Res = Found Crumbs | NotFound
Then, it seems, one could define:
instance MakeIdentifiable (Found e) e => Identifiable e where
getId = mkGetId (Proxy :: Proxy (Found e))
Now the question is how to define a type family for Res
that is associated to the types of GHC.Generics (U1
, K1
, :*:
, :+:
).
I've tried the following:
type family HasId e :: Res where
HasId Id = Found Here
HasId ((l :+: r) p) = Choose (HasId (l p)) (HasId (r p))
Where Choose
would be something like what is defined in the aforementioned blog post:
type family Choose e f :: Res where
Choose (Found a) b = Found (L1 a)
Choose a (Found b) = Found (R1 b)
Choose a b = NotFound
But this won't compile as HasId (l p)
has kind Res
and a type is expected instead.