edwardgeorge

{-# LANGUAGE GADTs, RankNTypes, TypeFamilies, DataKinds, PolyKinds, TypeOperators, ScopedTypeVariables #-}

-- Lots of ways you can phrase this, but this works for me
-- For folks who haven't seen it before, this is "the essence of the sum type" and sigma stands for sum.
-- You see it far more often in dependent types than elsewhere because it becomes a lot more pleasant to
-- work with there, but it's doable in other contexts too. Think of the first parameter to the data
-- constructor as a generalized "tag" as we talk about in "tagged union", and the second parameter is the
-- "payload". It turns out that you can represent any simple sum type you could write in Haskell this way
-- by using a finite and enumerable `f`, but things can get more unusual when `f` isn't either. In such
-- cases, it's often easier to think of this as the essence of existential types.