[Haskell-cafe] Why do I need UndecidableInstances?

[Alejandro Serrano Mena]

Dear café,
I'm trying to compile a set of simple examples using Functional
Dependencies. One of the first ones is the case of natural numbers, which
I've defined along with some operations as:

data Zero
data Succ a

class Plus x y z | x y -> z
instance Plus Zero x x
instance Plus x y z => Plus (Succ x) y (Succ z)

class Max x y z | x y -> z
instance Max Zero     y    y
instance Max (Succ x) Zero (Succ x)
instance Max x y z => Max (Succ x) (Succ y) (Succ z)

I thought the compiler would accept this only with the extensions
EmptyDataDecls, MultiParamTypeClasses, FunctionalDependencies and
FlexibleInstances. But, to my surprise, GHC is also asking me for
UndecidableInstances. Why is this the case?

Thanks in advance :)
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