Haskell' - class aliases

[Claus Reinke]

hmm, i thought i understood what class aliases were about,
but the recent discussion about superclasses and fixpoints
has me confused again.

may i suggest that the updated proposal page follows this
outline (in particular, providing 1 and 2 before diving into 3):

    1. general idea + one simple example to confirm intuition
        (if there are obvious misinterpretations, it might be 
        useful to list and discard them here)
    2. translation scheme (formal enough to run all examples)
    3. concrete examples to highlight difficult issues and
        special cases
    4. syntactic sugar to make typical uses easier

the way i thought i understood them (and the way i encoded
them in the example i sent), class aliases consist of two parts:

    A aliasing of constraints/classes
        (this is the semantic part that could also be explained by
        reduction, or by simple mutual implication encodings)

    B aliasing of syntax, especially instance definitions
        (this syntactic part is hard to encode, and simple in
        terms of syntactic macro expansion)

so, in writing 

    class alias A x = (B x,C x)

we'd get 

    from A: the semantic equivalence of the constraints,
                which we usually encode roughly like this

        class (B x,C x) => A x
        instance (B x,C x) => A x
        
    from B: the syntactic equivalence of different ways
                of defining instances of A,B, and C, which
                is best understood by expanding all instance
                definitions for A into instance definitions of
                B and C

        defining instances of B x and C x is equivalent to
        defining an instance of A x (so defining an instance
        of A x if either B x or C x already exist leads to
        duplicate instances)

everything else is syntactic sugar, such as having methods
or constraints in A that are not present in B or C.

if this is wrong somewhere, could you please correct it?
otherwise, i'll wait for the updated proposal page to 
explain the details.

claus