Haskell synonym of Plutarch types

Several sections of the guide use the terminology “Haskell synonym”. What does it mean? It’s simply the Haskell type that is supposed to correspond to a Plutarch type. There doesn’t necessarily have to be some sort of concrete connection (though there can be, using PLiftable) - it’s merely a connection you can establish mentally.

This detail does come into play in concrete use cases though. After compiling your Plutarch code to a Script, when you pass Haskell data types as arguments to the Script - they obviously need to correspond to the actual arguments of the Plutarch code. For example, if the Plutarch code is a function taking PByteString, after compilation to Script, you should pass in the Haskell data type that actually shares the same representation as PByteString - the “Haskell synonym”, so to speak. In this case, that’s ByteString*.

[*]: You can’t actually pass a ByteString into a compiled script. Notice that you can only pass Data arguments using applyArguments (from Plutarch.Evaluate). The Haskell synonym to Data is PAsData a (for any a), and PData.

Also see: Figuring out the representation of a Plutarch type.