Sean Leather | 15 Aug 17:04

Overlapping instances vs. Haskell98 Report [was: How to disable warning for "export item 'module ...' exports nothing"?]

Ross Paterson wrote:
On Fri, Aug 15, 2008 at 04:17:44PM +0200, Sean Leather wrote:
> module A where
> class A t where
>   a :: t
>
> module B where
> import A
> instance A Int where
>   a = 0
> a0 :: Int
> a0 = a
>
> module C where
> import A
> instance A Int where
>   a = 1
> a1 :: Int
> a1 = a
>
> module Main where
> import A
> import B
> import C
> main = do putStrLn $ "a0=" ++ show a0
>           putStrLn $ "a1=" ++ show a1
>
> This works, because of the way the instances are used. While overlapping
> instances are imported into Main, they are not used in Main.

Then that is a GHC bug.  Haskell 98 Report 4.3.2: "A type may not be
declared as an instance of a particular class more than once in the
program."

That's interesting. So, maybe there should be some language extension or warning (with associated -fno-warn) for this in GHC.

Personally, I prefer the way it's done now. (I guess that's obvious, considering I'm developing a library that will take advantage of it. ;) ) But it makes sense that instances are only looked up when needed, instead of globally tracked.

Sean
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Isaac Dupree | 15 Aug 17:39

Re: Overlapping instances vs. Haskell98 Report [was: How to disable warning for "export item 'module ...' exports nothing"?]

Sean Leather wrote:
> That's interesting. So, maybe there should be some language extension or
> warning (with associated -fno-warn) for this in GHC.
> 
> Personally, I prefer the way it's done now. (I guess that's obvious,
> considering I'm developing a library that will take advantage of it. ;) )
> But it makes sense that instances are only looked up when needed, instead of
> globally tracked.

see: http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/2356

Gmane