overloading is overrated, laws aren't twitter.com/mxavier/status
This Tweet is unavailable.
3
14
Conversation
By the way is there any reason you couldn't attach laws to just like, a record of functions? Why are classes special?
4
4
You're on to something very fundamental about type classes ;-)
1
1
What is it?
(Not sure if I should be thinking in the direction of "they're actually not special" or "they're more special than I think!")
2
1
Type classes are just a fancy, built-in way of passing records of functions around implicitly. Alas, they live in a separate language space.
1
2
I'm guessing you are already aware of this though 😉
1
2
1
3
I mean nothing too profound -- type classes tie "laws" to type-directed implicit arguments in a way that mystifies the two distinct concepts
2
4
in ML signatures specify an interface -- over both types and values -- and you can associate laws with the signature. much neater imo!
2
1
11
implicit module passing can then be handled separately, e.g. see "Modular Implicits" paper. maybe implicit are even just an editor feature!
1
2
Yup! Canonicity is sometimes nice to have, but it's good to see more explorations into alternatives, learning from Scala's mistakes.