Type Level Programming: Equality

Apocalisp has a great series on Type Level Programming with Scala. At some point the question came up whether it is possible to determine equality of types at run time by having the compiler generate types representing true and false respectively. Here is what I came up with.

trait True { type t = True }
trait False { type t = False }

case class Equality[A] {
  def check(x: A)(implicit t: True) = t
  def check[B](x: B)(implicit f: False) = f
}
object Equality {
  def witness[T] = null.asInstanceOf[T]
  implicit val t: True = null
  implicit val f: False = null
}

// Usage:
import Equality._
    
val test1 = Equality[List[Boolean]] check witness[List[Boolean]]
implicitly[test1.t =:= True]
// Does not compile since tt is True
// implicitly[test1.t =:= False]  

val test2 = Equality[Nothing] check witness[AnyRef]
// Does not compile since ft is False
// implicitly[test2.t =:= True]  
implicitly[test2.t =:= False]

Admittedly this is very hacky. For the time being I don’t see how to further clean this up. Anyone?

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Working around type erasure ambiguities (Scala)

In my previous post I showed a workaround for the type erasure ambiguity problem in Java. The solution uses vararg parameters for disambiguation. As Paul Phillips points out in his comment, this solution doesn’t directly port over to Scala. Java uses Array to pass varargs, Scala uses Seq. Unlike Array, Seq is not reified so Seq[String] and Seq[Int] again erase to the same type putting us back to square one.

However, there is another way to add disambiguation parameters to the methods: implicits! Here is how:

implicit val x: Int = 0
def foo(a: List[Int])(implicit ignore: Int) { }
  
implicit val y = ""
def foo(a: List[String])(implicit ignore: String) { }

foo(1::2::Nil)
foo("a"::"b"::Nil)