Overlapping, undecidable, incoherent -- or worse?

[Alex Ferguson]

On Thu, May 20, 2004 at 05:27:43PM +0100, MR K P SCHUPKE wrote:
> >I wasn't talking about _any_ notion of ordering of instance heads;  I
> >said that prioritising instance _declarations_ themselves, explicitly,
> >by 'name' would suffice.
> 
> How does that help... if you name the instances differently are they
> not just ordinary functions, as they would no longer be overloaded?

I thought I expounded on that, too.  If there were a facility to 'name'
(in a general sense, not as in the function namespace) instance
declarations, it'd facilitate (by way of some further, hypothetical
language extension) specifying _explicitly_ which declarations should be
construed as overriding which others, when they would otherwise be seen
to clash.