With fixpoint-fixing, we don't want to re-unify type variables that were
just fixed, because doing so may change their shapes in ways that we
explicitly just set them up not to be changed (as fixpoint-fixing
clobbers type variable contents).
However, this restriction need only apply when we re-unify two type
variables that were both involved in the same fixpoint-fixing cycle. If
we have a type variable T that was involved in fixpoint-fixing, and we
unify it with U that wasn't, we know that the $U \notin \bar{T}$, where
$\bar{T}$ is the recursive closure of T. In these cases, we do want to
permit the usual in-band unification of $T \sim U$.
As previously discovered with #4464, it's easy to accidentally mis-use the State value returned on the Err path.
There were mixed assumptions about what that State represents: (1) the State where the error occurred, or (2) the State at the beginning of the thing we were just parsing.
I fixed this up to always mean (2) - at which point we don't actually need to return the State at all - so it's impossible for further discrepency to creep in.
I also took the liberty to refactor a few more methods to be purely combinator-based, rather than calling `parse` directly.
My concern with the previous wording is that:
- Beginners will be confused by "these are always open"
- Users advanced enough to understand what that actually means won't benefit from seeing it in this warning message!
When we attempt to bind a type argument to an ability in an alias/opaque
instantiation, we create a fresh flex var to represent satisfaction of
the ability, and then unify the type argument with that flex var.
Previously, we did not register this fresh var in the appropriate rank
pool.
Usually this is not a problem; however, our generalization algorithm is
such that we skip adjusting the rank of redundant variables. Redundant
variables are those that are in the same unification tree, but are not
the root of the unification trees.
This means that if such a flex able var becomes the root of a
unification tree with the type argument, and the type argument is itself
generalized, we will have missed generalization of the argument.
The fix is simple - make sure to register the flex able var into the
appropriate rank pool.
Closes#4408
