Overlapping, undecidable, incoherent -- or worse?

[Alex Ferguson]

On Thu, May 20, 2004 at 05:58:53PM +0100, MR K P SCHUPKE wrote:
> The alternative to the current situation is to take into account the
> dependancies of instances when selecting. The problem here is that
> the compiler may select an instance, evaluate its dependencies, only
> to discover somewhere further on that the dependencies cannot be met.
> At this point it has to backtrack (reverse its previous decisions) and
> try another instance.  This effectively means implementing a Prolog
> style solver in the compiler - which leads to the further problems of
> the compiler possible not terminating (ie taking forever to not 
> compile something)...

Which is the case as soon as you use the -fallow-undecidable-instances
flag in any event.  My suggestion might make things worse pragmatically,
but I don't see it can be any moreso theorically.  You may claim that
it's not an attractive change, or doesn't help in some more general case
than the one I asked about;  but I don't see how you can possibly
maintain it immediately wrecks the type system, or that it doesn't
resolve the problem in this case, which is not so much that finding a
valid instance is difficult, but that there are _two_ possible such, and
no way at the language level to say which is desired.