DatatypeContexts Deprecated in Latest GHC: Why?

Question

I was just doing some Haskell development and I recompiled some old code on a new version of GHC:

The Glorious Glasgow Haskell Compilation System, version 7.2.1 

And when I did I received the following error:

Warning: -XDatatypeContexts is deprecated: It was widely considered a misfeature, and has been removed from the Haskell language.

That appears when you have code in the following format:

data Ord a => MyType a     = ConstructorOne a     | ConstructorTwo a a 

My question is: Why was this feature deprecated in the first place and what am I supposed to do instead to achieve the same or similar functionality?

Answer 1

It's deprecated because it was a misfeature, and didn't actually have any useful functionality! All it did was force a bunch of extra constraints in other locations. In particular, when pattern matching on such a type, you'd be forced to add a constraint, rather than (as one might initially hope) get access to a context, based on the knowledge that one must have been available to construct the value in the first place.

The "replacement", which actually works the other way and tracks the known contexts for you, is to use GADT-style declarations instead:

data MyType a where     ConstructorOne :: Ord a => a -> MyType a     ConstructorTwo :: Ord a => a -> a -> MyType a 

GADTs in general are more flexible in many other ways as well, but for this particular case what happens is that creating a value needs the Ord constraint, which is then carried along with the value, and pattern matching on the constructor pulls it back out. So you don't even need the context on the functions using it, because you know that by virtue of expecting something of type MyType a, you'll get an Ord a constraint with it.

Answer 2

In general, you still need to add the Ord a constraint to any function which uses your MyType type, and as such isn't as useful as it may seem. For more information about why they were removed, see http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/haskell-prime/wiki/NoDatatypeContexts