To my request on overlapping instances in 6.6 candidate Simon Peyton-Jones <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes on 4 Sep 2006
> [..] > > GHC 6.6's story is that an instance declaration can only be overlapped > if you compile that module with -fallow-overlapping-instances. Since > the list instance for Show was not compiled in this way, you can't > overlap it. > > You may think this is annoying -- but it does mean that you can look at > an instance declaration and see whether it might be overlapped, just by > look at the flags for that module. But why to restrict the user, why one needs to detect which library instance can be overlapped? Why not to allow all of them to overlap? Here is an example of how I alayws was using overlaps with standard instances. ------------------------------------------------ data Equation = ... instance Show Equation where ... instance Show [Equation] where showsPrec _ eqs = <certain program which prints a list of equation in a `nicer' way than by the default list printing > ------------------------------------------------ This gives the user possibility to redefine a certain part of the library instance. Is not ghc-6.4.1 better at this point? ----------------- Serge Mechveliani [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Glasgow-haskell-users mailing list Glasgow-haskell-users@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/glasgow-haskell-users