CODEWITHSUNDEEP
haskelltypesalgebraic-data-types
doofin
doofin

Reputation: 498

haskell sum type multiple declaration error

data A=A
data B=B
data AB=A|B

Which makes a sum type AB from A and B.

but the last line induces a compile error "multiple declarations of B"

I also tried sth like this:

data A=Int|Bool

It compiles. but why ghc disallows me from making sum types for user-defined types?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 662

Answers (4)

dfeuer
dfeuer

Reputation: 48631

Sum types have to be tagged. a+a has to have two injections from a.

To understand how algebraic data types work, take a simple example:

data X = A | B C

This defines a new type constructor, X, along with data constructors A and B. The B constructor takes/holds an argument of type C.

The primary canonical sum type in Haskell is Either:

data Either a b = Left a | Right b

Upvotes: 1

Daniel Wagner
Daniel Wagner

Reputation: 153247

You're getting fooled. You think when you write data A=Int|Bool that you are saying that a value of type A can be a value of type Int or a value of type Bool; but what you are actually saying is that there are two new value-level constructors named Int and Bool, each containing no information at all, of type A. Similarly, you think that data AB=A|B says you can either be of type A or type B, but in fact you are saying you can either have value A or value B.

The key thing to keep in mind is that there are two namespaces, type-level and term-level, and that they are distinct.

Here is a simple example of how to do it right:

data A=A
data B=B
data AB=L A|R B

The last line declares two new term-level constructors, L and R. The L constructor carries a value of type A, while the R constructor carries a value of type B.

You might also like the Either type, defined as follows:

data Either a b = Left a | Right b

You could use this to implement your AB if you wanted:

type AB = Either A B

Similarly, you could use Either Int Bool for your tagged union of Int and Bool.

Upvotes: 6

Evan Sebastian
Evan Sebastian

Reputation: 1744

Because the type of the value created using data constructor A or B will be ambiguous. When I have a = B for instance, what is the type of a? It is A or AB?

You should consider using different data constructor as follows:

data A = MkA
data B = MkB
data AB = A A | B B

Upvotes: 1

Rein Henrichs
Rein Henrichs

Reputation: 15605

When you say data AB = A | B, you are not referring to the types A and B, but rather are defining data constructors A and B. These conflict with the constructors defined on the the previous lines.

If you want to create a type AB that is the sum of A and B, you must provide data constructors that wrap the types A and B, e.g.:

data AB = ABA A | ABB B

Upvotes: 1

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