Proposal: Add default instances for Functor and Applicative

[Bas van Dijk]

On 24 September 2011 09:20, Antoine Latter <aslatter at gmail.com> wrote:
> From what I understand (I haven't tried the extension yet) you would
> still need an instance declaration, even if it had no body:

Yes you would indeed.

While I already said I liked this idea, I do see one complication: as
also explained in the DefaulSuperclassInstances[1] proposal there can
be multiple ways of defining fmap:

  default fmap :: Applicative f => (a -> b) -> f a -> f b
  fmap = Control.Applicative.liftA

  default fmap :: Traversable f => (a -> b) -> f a -> f b
  fmap = Data.Traversable.fmapDefault

Which do we choose? I'm happy with liftA but others might disagree.

With regard to [1], is there already a plan to implement them? And if
so, when is it expected to be finished? If it takes some time, this
might be a temporary solution.

Regards,

Bas

[1] http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/DefaultSuperclassInstances