data families syntax

[Harendra Kumar]

I am curious about why the data families syntax was chosen to be the way it
is. For example a list can be defined as follows:

data family List a

data instance List Char = Empty | Cons Char (List Char)

data instance List ()   = Count Int


Instead why not define it as:

data List :: * -> *

data List Char = Empty | Cons Char (List Char)

data List ()   = Count Int


The latter form looks more intuitive and easy to remember to me since it is
very similar to the way value level functions are defined (signature &
pattern matching defs). Here we are just defining a type level function
instead.

-harendra
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