[Haskell-cafe] Kind-agnostic type classes

[Florian Weimer]

I'm trying to encode a well-known, informally-specified type system in
Haskell.  What causes problems for me is that type classes force types
to be of a specific kind.  The system I'm targeting however assumes that
its equivalent of type classes are kind-agnositic.

For instance, I've got

class Assignable a where
    assign :: a -> a -> IO ()

class Swappable a where
    swap :: a -> a -> IO ()

class CopyConstructible a where
    copy :: a -> IO a

class (Assignable a, CopyConstructible a) => ContainerType a

class (Swappable c, Assignable c, CopyConstructible c) => Container c where
    size :: (Num i, ContainerType t) => c t -> IO i

I suppose I could address this with creating aliases for the relevant
classes, but I wonder if there is a better workaround.

I see that the ML module system has a similar restriction on type
sharing.  Is there a fundamental reasons behind this?