Context alias

Context aliases, also known as class aliases, are a long-requested feature of Haskell. This feature would allow class hierarchies to be restructured without breaking compatibility to a certain degree. Also, it would make fine-grained class hierarchies usable.

The proposal

The original class alias proposal

The original proposal can be found on a page on John Meachem’s website.

Improvements

A “class alias” actually doesn’t stand for a class but for a context (or a part of a context). So it might be better to choose a slightly different syntax:

context Foobar a = (Foo a, Bar a)

John Meacham proposes the following syntax for class aliases (context aliases) with superclass constraints:

class alias Num a = Eq a => (Additive a, Multiplicative a)

This is not consistent with the superclass syntax of class declarations. I think, we should use this syntax:

class alias Eq a => Num a = (Additive a, Multiplicative a)

Or better:

context Eq a => Num a = (Additive a, Multiplicative a)

Implementation

Starting an implementation of context aliases is planned for the 5th Haskell Hackathon.