instance declarations

[David Feuer]

(sorry to mess up mail threading, but I couldn't properly reply to the
message the way I'm using email right now--broken mail clients)

>Recently, however, there has been some interest in using named instance
>declarations in other ways, so perhaps we will see features like this
>creeping into future versions of the language.

In what kinds of ways?  Sounds interesting.


>[Of course, there is a way of naming instance declarations with the
>current Haskell syntax, although it is a little verbose, and would
>require more work on the implementers part than simple matching of
>strings.  The syntax I'm thinking of would look something like the
>following:
>
>  module M(C(..), instance C Int, instance C a => C [a]) where ...

This is the sort of thing I was thinking too.  But I would probably want
to extend that to classes and types.  For instance

module M (class Eq a=>C a (...), type A, instance C A, instance C a => C
[a])
where ...

If I am not mistaken, this would allow separation of the type namespace
from the typeclass namespace, and would make it obvious whether the thing
being exported is a type or a class.  It could also potentially allow the
context(s) for class and instance declarations to be more restrictive in
the header or in imports than in the module body.  The latter could
perhaps allow resolution of overlapping instances at import time, by
restricting the instances to the point of non-overlap.  I'm not sure that
the former would actually be useful.

Hmmm.... speaking of overlapping instances...  Would there be a
practical way to add negation (of classes and possibly even types) to the
context syntax?  This would let you say

instance (Integral a) => C (T a) where ...
instance (not Integral a, Real a) => C (T a) where ...
instance (not Num a) => C (T a) where ...
....

It would also seem nice to be able to say

instance (Integral a, not a Int) => C a where ....
and 
instance C Int where .....

but this seems even more questionable.