Sorry to be picky but there is no violation of the FD here. Note that
the class D has only a single ground instance and to violate an FD you
need at least two.
perhaps you are thinking of functional dependencies as
being defined extensionally, over the extent of the type
relations specified by multiparameter type classes?
somewhat counterintuitively, this isn't quite the case
(just as instance selection doesn't take contexts into
account..). to get an FD conflict, it is sufficient to have
two conflicting constraints, no need for any instances.
consider
module Fail(Fail) where
class X a
class X a => Fail a
module Main where
import Fail
class C a b | a -> b
instance Fail a => C [a] Bool
since superclass X has no instances and is not exported from
module Fail, class Fail, though exported, can have no instances.
so the instance declaration given for C seems entirely useless,
as far as the relation over types is concerned - there are no
ground instances of C. nevertheless, it is taken into account
when considering functional dependencies:
Hugs:
:t undefined :: C [a] b => (a,b)
undefined :: C [a] Bool => (a,Bool)
and so adding an instance for 'C [a] Char' would lead to an
FD conflict.
just checking,
claus
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