overlapping instances and constraints

[Ben Rudiak-Gould]

Claus Reinke wrote:
> most of us would be happy if instance contexts
> would be required to uniquely determine the instance to be
> chosen, a rather conservative extension of current practice.

How would that work? There's no way to prove that

     instance (Num a) => Foo a where ...
     instance Foo Char where ...

don't overlap, because there's no way to know what instances of Num might be 
declared in other modules. If you reason based on what's in scope, you end 
up with the same problems that Simon detailed for overlapping instances. I 
can't think of any situation where the context could safely be used to 
resolve overlap except for a class private to the current module whose 
instances are locally constrained, but that doesn't seem like it would be 
very useful.

-- Ben