[Haskell-cafe] lists as instances of a class?

[David Roundy]

(This email is a literate haskell program that fails to compile
without -fglasgow-exts.)

I'm sure I'm missing something lame here, but can someone tell me why
we apparently can't declare a list to be an instance of a class in
Haskell 98? Or is there perhaps some other syntax by which I'd declare
this instance? If so, is this slated for fixing in Haskell'?

$ ghc Test.lhs

Test.lhs:6:1:
    Illegal instance declaration for `Vec [Double]'
        (The instance type must be of form (T a b c)
         where T is not a synonym, and a,b,c are distinct type variables)
    In the instance declaration for `Vec [Double]'

> module Vec where

> class Vec v where
>    (.+.) :: v -> v -> v

> instance Vec [Double] where
>    xs .+. ys = zipWith (+) xs ys

> instance Vec Double where
>    x .+. y = x + y

feeling very stupid,
David

P.S. This is with ghc 6.4.1.  And oddly enough, if you make the instance

instance Num a => Vec [a] where
   xs .+. ys = zipWith (+) xs ys

it works fine, but this strikes me as quite an ugly hack.  I really
want only Doubles to be instances of this class (which I've
abbreviated for this email).