[Haskell-cafe] YAHT: Ex 9.2

[Magnus Therning]

I've been slowly making my way through Yet Another Haskell Tutorial.  As
a first introduction to the language it doesn't seem bad at all.
However, I'm wondering about the proposed solution to exercise 9.2.  The
text itself suggests using "instance Monad (Either String) where", so I
arrived at

  instance Monad (Either String) where
      return a = Right a
      fail a = Left a
      Right a >>= f = f a
      Left a >>= _ = Left a

However, when loading it in ghci 6.6 I get the following error message:

     Illegal instance declaration for `Monad (Either String)'
        (The instance type must be of form (T a b c)
         where T is not a synonym, and a,b,c are distinct type variables)
    In the instance declaration for `Monad (Either String)'

The solution, according to the author is

  instance Monad (Either String) where
      return x = Right x
      fail s = Left s
      Right x >>= f = f x
      Left s >>= _ = Left s

Which results in exactly the same error message.

I'm suspecting this is a result of my limited grasp of Haskell's syntax
(an area where YAHT is sorely lacking).  Any tips/pointers appreciated.

/M

-- 
Magnus Therning                             (OpenPGP: 0xAB4DFBA4)
magnus at therning.org             Jabber: magnus.therning at gmail.com
http://therning.org/magnus

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     -- Albert Einstein
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