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A (Silly?) Question About Universal Type Quantification
- Will M Farr
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Date: | 2009-09-10 (15:01) |
From: | Will M Farr <farr@M...> |
Subject: | A (Silly?) Question About Universal Type Quantification |
Hello, I recently encountered a situation where I had (effectively) the following polymorphic type: type 'a record = { id : int; data : 'a } and the following compare function let compare {id = id1} {id = id2} = Pervasives.compare id1 id2 and wanted to put such records into a set. However, I could not figure out how to make the polymorphic 'a in the type definition "disappear" in the module argument to the Set.Make functor. For example, the obvious Set.Make(struct type t = 'a record let compare = compare end) fails because the 'a in the type definition for t is unbound. Is there no way to do this? I'm thinking of some sort of "forall" designation, which universally quantifies the type parameter, like Set.Make(struct type t = forall 'a : 'a record let compare = compare end) (I'm sure that there is better terminology for this---please pardon my ignorance about types and type theory.) I ended up solving my problem by placing the record type into a functor, whose argument specified the concrete type for data, but I'm curious if other solutions exist. Thanks, Will