What uses have you found for higher-rank types in Haskell?

Question

Higher rank types look like great fun. From the Haskell wikibook comes this example:

foo :: (forall a. a -> a) -> (Char,Bool)
foo f = (f \'c\', f True)
         


        

Answer 1

Take a look at functions like withRepoLock in the Darcs source.

Darcs has support for multiple repository formats, and that support is expressed via a typeclass. So you can write code that is generic over repository formats. When actually reading an on-disk repository you want to dispatch to that code through some common code that figures out what format the repository is in and chooses the right typeclass instantiation.