overlapping instances in 7.10.1

[Sergei Meshveliani]

On Mon, 2015-06-15 at 09:29 +0000, Simon Peyton Jones wrote: 
> |  This is why I think that  ghc-7.8.3  treats the OI notion in a more
> |  natural way than ghc-7.10.1 does.
> |  May be, ghc-7.10.1 has a better technical tool for this, but  ghc-
> |  7.8.3 corresponds to a natural notion of OI.
> |  
> |  Can GHC return to a natural OI notion?
> |  Or am I missing something?
> 
> Well it all depends what you mean by "natural". To me it is profoundly un-natural to deliberately have the same type-class constraint solved in two different ways in the same program!
> 
> To require this would prevent cross-module specialisation. If I have	
> 	f :: C a => a -> a
> in one module, and I specialise it to
> 	f_spec :: [Int] -> [Int]
> in one module, I want to be free to re-use that specialisation in other modules.  But under your "natural" story, I cannot do that, because (C [Int]) might be resolved differently there.
> 
> I'd be interested in what others think.  I've started
> 	https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/10526
> to collect these points.
> 
> Meanwhile, Sergei, it's clear how to fix docon, so you are no longer stuck.



I hope DoCon is not stuck -- because it relies (so far) on  ghc-7.8.3.

But I need to understand the subject of  overlapping instances  (OI).


----------
I am writing this _here_ because to clicking at    
     https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/10526

my browser responds   Problem occurred while loading the URL   
  https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/10526
  SSL handshake failed: A TLS fatal alert has been received.

Then, I start searching from   https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/
and cannot find #10526
Also I had earlier a certain difficulty with registering to this bug
tracker, and suspect that registration was not fully successful, so that
I doubt that I can write there.

May I, please, discuss the subject here?
-------------------


The report of  7.10.1-errReport-may23-2015.zip
shows that 7.8.3 and 7.10.1  treat OI differently,
But this report is rather complex.

Instead consider the following simple example.

--------------------------------------------
module A where
class Size a where size :: a -> Int

instance {-# OVERLAPPING #-}
         Size [a] where  size = length

f :: Size a => a -> Int
f = size

g :: [Maybe Int] -> Int
g = size

----------------------------------------
module Main where
import A

instance {-# OVERLAPPING #-}
         Size [Maybe a] where  size _ = -1

mbs = []  :: [Maybe Int]

main = putStr (shows (f mbs) "\n")         -- I   -1
       -- putStr (shows (g mbs) "\n")      -- II   0
--------------------------------------------

Making and running in  ghc-7.10.1 :

  ghc --make -XFlexibleInstances Main
  ./Main

It prints  "-1"  for the line (I) for main,
and        "0"   for the line (II).

To compare to  ghc-7.8.3,  comment out the pragma and add
-XOverlappingInstances  to the  ghc  call.

And this yields the same results  -1 and  -0  respectively.

Please, how to change (a bit) the above simple example in order to see
the difference between 7.8.3 and 7.10.1
?

Thanks,

------
Sergei