[Haskell-cafe] lists as instances of a class?

[Bayley, Alistair]

> From: haskell-cafe-bounces at haskell.org 
> [mailto:haskell-cafe-bounces at haskell.org] On Behalf Of Spencer Janssen
> 
> The problem isn't with lists specifically, but  with any instance that
> applies types (rather than type variables) to a type constructor
> 
> >From section 4.3.2 of The Haskell 98 Report: "The type (T u1 ... uk)
> must take the form of a type constructor T applied to simple type
> variables u1, ... uk".  I've run into this restriction several times
> myself, and I'm also curious whether this will change in Haskell'.
> 
> 
> Spencer Janssen


Sorry, I'm struggling with this. Why is [] not of the form (T a b c ...)
?

I assume that [] is syntactic sugar for something like:

data List a = Cons a | Nil   ===>?  data [a] = (:) a | []

so [Double] is just sugar for List Double, which appears to me to be of
the form (T a b c ...).

What subtlety am I missing?

Thanks,
Alistair
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