VEither (biased variant)

Variants have the following kind of types: V '[W,X,Y,Z]. This is great when all the inner types play the same role. However in some cases we want one type to be the main one and the other ones to be secondaries.

For instance we could have the variant whose type is V '[Result,ErrorA,ErrorB,ErrorC] to represent the result of a function. In this case, the first type is the main one and it would be great to be able to define the common type-classes (Functor, Monad, etc.) so that we have easy access to it.

VEither is a Variant wrapper that does exactly this:

newtype VEither es a = VEither (V (a : es))

It is isomorphic to the following type: Either (V es) a. The difference is in the runtime representation: VEither es a has one less indirection than Either (V es) a (it uses only one tag value).

VRight and VLeft

VEither es a values can be created and matched on with the VRight and VLeft patterns (just as if we had the Either (V es) a type).

>>> VRight True :: VEither '[String,Int] Bool
VRight True

>>> VLeft (V "failed" :: V '[String,Int]) :: VEither '[String,Int] Bool
VLeft "failed"

Common instances

The main advantage of VEither es a over V (a ': es) is that we define instances for common type-classes such as Functor, Applicative, Monad, Foldable, etc.:

>>> let x = VRight True :: VEither '[Int,Float] Bool
>>> fmap (\b -> if b then "Success" else "Failure") x
VRight "Success"

>>> let x = VRight True  :: VEither '[Int,Float] Bool
>>> let y = VRight False :: VEither '[Int,Float] Bool
>>> (&&) <$> x <*> y
VRight False

>>> let x   = VRight True    :: VEither '[Int,Float] Bool
>>> let f v = VRight (not v) :: VEither '[Int,Float] Bool
>>> x >>= f
VRight False

>>> let x   = VRight True    :: VEither '[Int,Float] Bool
>>> let y   = VLeft (V "failed" :: V '[String,Int]) :: VEither '[String,Int] Bool
>>> forM_ x print
True
>>> forM_ y print