[Haskell-cafe] Type family fun

[Chris Eidhof]

Hey all,

I was playing around with type families, and I have a strange problem.

Suppose we have an alternative to an Either datatype:

 > data (:|:) a b = Inl a | Inr b

and a class Ix:

 > class Ix i where
 >   type IxMap i :: * -> *
 >   empty  :: IxMap i [Int]

Now I want to give an instance for (a :|: b):

 > instance (Ix l, Ix r) => Ix (l :|: r) where
 >   type IxMap (l :|: r) = BiApp (IxMap l) (IxMap r)
 >   empty = BiApp empty empty

BiApp is defined as following:

 > data BiApp a b c = BiApp (a c) (b c)

However, it looks like the recursive calls to empty can't be unified,  
I get the following error message:

     Couldn't match expected type `IxMap l'
            against inferred type `IxMap i'
       Expected type: IxMap (l :|: r) [Int]
       Inferred type: BiApp (IxMap i) (IxMap i1) [Int]
     In the expression: BiApp empty empty
     In the definition of `empty': empty = BiApp empty empty

In the inferred type, there should be IxMap l instead of IxMap i, does  
anybody know what I'm doing wrong?

Thanks,

-chris