[Haskell-cafe] Expressing disjunctions of constraints

[Olaf Klinke]

Dear cafe, 

today I wrote a type class with three parameters.

class Foo a b c | a b -> c where
  foo :: a -> b -> c
instance Foo A R A where ...
instance Foo R A A where ...

In addition to the functional dependency I'd like to express that at least one of the parameters a and b is c, that is, Foo is the union of the two classes 

class Foo1 a b where
  foo1 :: a -> b -> a
class Foo2 a b where
  foo2 :: a -> b -> b

and furthermore the choice between Foo1 and Foo2 determines one parameter to be a fixed type, say R. I understand that logical disjunction poses problems for instance resolution [1] because adding an instance may affect the instance dictionary lookup. This should not happen in my case because in the end this would be a one-parameter type class. The ultimate aim is to use the same symbol for both a function
foo :: R -> a -> a
and for flip foo. Of course writing flip foo is not that much of a nuisance, I just wonder whether Haskell is expressive enough to do this. 

Olaf

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10255148/how-can-i-combine-two-type-constraints-with-a-logical-or-in-haskell