Instances of multiple classes at once

[Dylan Thurston]

(Superficially irrelevant digression:)

Simon Peyton-Jones came here today and talked about his combinator
library for financial applications, as in his paper "Composing
Contracts".  One of the points he made was that a well-designed
combinator library for financial traders should have combinators that
work on a high level; then, when they want to start writing their own
contracts, they can learn about a somewhat smaller set of building
blocks inside that; then eventually they might learn about the
fundamental building blocks.  (Examples of different levels from the
paper: "european"; "zcb"; "give"; "anytime".)

One theory is that a well-designed class library has the same
property.  But standard Haskell doesn't allow this; that is why I like
the proposal to allow a single instances to simultaneously declare
instances of superclasses.  One problem is how to present the
information on the type hierarchy to users.  (This is a problem in
Haskell anyway; I find myself referring to the source of the Prelude
while writing programs, which seems like a Bad Thing when extrapolated
to larger modules.)

On Thu, Feb 08, 2001 at 09:41:56PM +1100, Fergus Henderson wrote:
> One point that needs to be  resolved is the interaction with default methods.
> 
> Consider
> 
>         class foo a where
>                 f :: ...
> 		f = ...
>                 f2 :: ...
> 		f2 = ...
> 
>         class (foo a) => bar a where
>                 b :: ...
>  
>         instance bar T where
> 		-- no definitions for f or f2
> 		b = 42
> 
> Should this define an instance for `foo T'?
> (I think not.)

Whyever not?  Because there is no textual mention of class Foo in the
instance for Bar?  Think about the case of a superclass with no methods;
wouldn't you want to allow automatic instances in this case?


One might even go further and allow a class to declare default methods
for a superclass:

class Foo a where
   f :: ...

class (Foo a) => Bar a where
   b :: ...
   b = ...
   f = ...

Best,
	Dylan Thurston