[Haskell-cafe] Type class hell

[Christophe Poucet]

Dear,

I am writing a compiler (as you may have gathered from some previous 
messages). Anyways I am stuck with a small monadic issue. I mostly use 
indirect composite as this gives me the most flexibility with regards 
taking out parts of the AST, or decorating at whim. Basically the 
question regards how to implement a certain instance. Currently I have 
the code that can be seen below. What I would like to do is combine 
HasVars and Type (mostly because in my framework the two concepts 
shouldn't be divided from a design perspective) into one type class to 
clean it up a bit. However I fail to see how I would implement toType 
and fromType for the given instance. Is this feasible without resorting 
to ugly hacks?

--- Types
data MonoType mt =
TyVar Var
| TyConst Const [mt]
deriving (Eq, Show)

data PolyType mt =
TyPoly [Var] mt
deriving (Show)

class Type mt where
toType :: mt -> MonoType mt
fromType :: MonoType mt -> mt

class HasVars a where
freeVars :: a -> [Var]
occurs :: Var -> a -> Bool

toPoly :: (HasVars a) => a -> PolyType a
toPoly x = TyPoly (freeVars x) x

instance HasVars a => HasVars (MonoType a) where
freeVars (TyVar x) = [x]
freeVars (TyConst _ xs) = nub . concatMap freeVars $ xs
occurs x (TyVar y) = x == y
occurs x (TyConst _ xs) = or . map (occurs x) $ xs

Cheers,
Christophe(vincenz)

-- 
Christophe Poucet
Ph.D. Student
Phone:+32 16 28 87 20
E-mail: Christophe (dot) Poucet (at) imec (dot) be
Website: http://notvincenz.com/  
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