data families syntax

I am curious about why the data families syntax was chosen to be the way it is. For example a list can be defined as follows: data family List a data instance List Char = Empty | Cons Char (List Char) data instance List () = Count Int Instead why not define it as: data List :: * -> * data List Char = Empty | Cons Char (List Char) data List () = Count Int The latter form looks more intuitive and easy to remember to me since it is very similar to the way value level functions are defined (signature & pattern matching defs). Here we are just defining a type level function instead. -harendra