[Haskell-cafe] Extending Type Classes

[Simon Peyton-Jones]

See http://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/DefaultSuperclassInstances

| -----Original Message-----
| From: Haskell-Cafe [mailto:haskell-cafe-bounces at haskell.org] On Behalf
| Of Henning Thielemann
| Sent: 26 August 2013 20:07
| To: Frantisek Farka
| Cc: Haskell Cafe
| Subject: Re: [Haskell-cafe] Extending Type Classes
| 
| 
|   The problem of refinement of type classes annoys me from time to time
| when I work on the NumericPrelude. It is an experimental type class
| hierarchy for mathematical types. Sometimes a new data type T shall be
| implemented and it turns out that you can implement only a part of all
| methods of a certain class. Then a natural step is to split the class
| into
| two classes A and B: 'A' contains the methods we can implement for T and
| 'B' contains the remaining methods and 'B' is a sub-class of 'A'.
|   First, this means that all client code has to be rewritten. Second,
| code
| for instances becomes very lengthy, because over the time code tends to
| contain one instances for every method. However the many small instances
| actually carry information: Every instance has its specialised
| constraints. E.g. you would certainly try to use only Applicative
| constraints in an Applicative instance and not Monad constraints.
| However,
| if there is a way to define Applicative and Monad instances in one go,
| the
| Applicative instance may get Monad constraints.
| 
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