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Simon Peyton Jones authored
A message to Haskell Cafe from Grzegorz Chrupala made me realise that GHC was not handling implicit parameters correctly, when it comes to choosing the variables to quantify, and ambiguity tests. Here's the note I added to TcSimplify: Note [Implicit parameters and ambiguity] ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ What type should we infer for this? f x = (show ?y, x::Int) Since we must quantify over the ?y, the most plausible type is f :: (Show a, ?y::a) => Int -> (String, Int) But notice that the type of the RHS is (String,Int), with no type varibables mentioned at all! The type of f looks ambiguous. But it isn't, because at a call site we might have let ?y = 5::Int in f 7 and all is well. In effect, implicit parameters are, well, parameters, so we can take their type variables into account as part of the "tau-tvs" stuff. This is done in the function 'FunDeps.grow'. The actual changes are in FunDeps.grow, and the tests are tc219, tc219
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