[Haskell-cafe] higher kind in parametric type

[Olaf Klinke]

Dear cafe,

I am writing a library for parsing higher-kinded data, based on the czipwith package [1]. I ran into the following problem.

I have a type class
class Config p f | f -> p where
    f :: (* -> *) -> *
is the higher-kinded data and
    p :: * -> *
is the associated parser type.

I want to add a class member that does not mention f in its type, e.g. 

heading :: p String

Naturally, this would lead to ambiguity checks to fail, as the usage of heading does not tell which Config instance to use. My usual workaround would be to wrap `heading` in a phantom type, e.g.
    data Heading f p = Heading (p String)
and give `heading` the type Heading f p. However, ghc-8.0.2 complains about f not being a type:

    • Expecting one more argument to ‘f’
      Expected a type, but ‘f’ has kind ‘(* -> *) -> *’
    • In the first argument of ‘Heading’, namely ‘f’
      In the type signature:
        heading :: Heading f p
      In the class declaration for ‘Config’

Is there a restriction of the kinds that can be used in parametric types?

Cheers,
Olaf

[1] http://hackage.haskell.org/package/czipwith