Look at how instance declarations are parsed. If you look at Parser.y you’ll see that for instance (Eq a, Eq b) => Eq (a,b) we get (in effect) mkImplicitHsForAllTy (mkQualifiedHsForAllTy (Eq a, Eq b) (Eq (a,b)) The outer mkImplicit.. is to ensure that there is always, in the end, a HsForAllTy around the whole thing, even around instance Eq a say. But we don’t actually want two nested HsForAllTys. mk_forall_ty collapsed the two. But you don’t want that either. So I think you should make mkImplictHsForAllTy do the test instead. Its goal is to wrap a HsForallTy if there isn’t one already. So mkImplicitHsForAllTy (HsForAllTy exp tvs cxt ty) = HsForAllTy exp’ tvs cxt ty where exp’ = case exp of Qualified -> Implicit _ -> exp mkImplicitHsForAllTy ty = mkHsForAllTy Implicit [] (L loc _) ty should do the job. Incidentally, mkImplicitHsForAllTy should not take a ctxt argument. If you have a non-empty context, use mkQualifiedHsForAllTy. That means that in Convert you’ll need to use mkHsForAllTy Implicit ctxt ty’ instead of mkImplicitHsForAllTy Simon From: Alan & Kim Zimmerman [mailto:alan.zimm@gmail.com] Sent: 10 April 2015 08:02 To: Simon Peyton Jones Cc: ghc-devs@haskell.org Subject: Re: Collapsing HsForAllTy, again If I replace it with mkHsForAllTy :: HsExplicitFlag -> [LHsTyVarBndr RdrName] -> LHsContext RdrName -> LHsType RdrName -> HsType RdrName -- Smart constructor for HsForAllTy -- mkHsForAllTy exp tvs (L _ []) ty = mk_forall_ty exp tvs ty mkHsForAllTy exp tvs (L _ []) ty = HsForAllTy exp Nothing (mkHsQTvs tvs) (L noSrcSpan []) ty mkHsForAllTy exp tvs ctxt ty = HsForAllTy exp extra (mkHsQTvs tvs) cleanCtxt ty where -- Separate the extra-constraints wildcard when present (cleanCtxt, extra) | (L l HsWildcardTy) <- ignoreParens (last (unLoc ctxt)) = (init `fmap` ctxt, Just l) | otherwise = (ctxt, Nothing) ignoreParens (L _ (HsParTy ty)) = ty -- TODO:AZ We lose the annotation here ignoreParens ty = ty I get the following errors in the stage 2 compile (only first 3 shown here) libraries/ghc-prim/GHC/Classes.hs:52:19: Malformed instance: (Eq a, Eq b) => Eq (a, b) libraries/ghc-prim/GHC/Classes.hs:53:19: Malformed instance: (Eq a, Eq b, Eq c) => Eq (a, b, c) libraries/ghc-prim/GHC/Classes.hs:54:19: Malformed instance: (Eq a, Eq b, Eq c, Eq d) => Eq (a, b, c, d) Alan On Fri, Apr 10, 2015 at 12:14 AM, Simon Peyton Jones <simonpj@microsoft.com<mailto:simonpj@microsoft.com>> wrote: Hmm. I’m not sure what the motivation is either. Try dropping it out and see if anything goes wrong. Simon From: ghc-devs [mailto:ghc-devs-bounces@haskell.org<mailto:ghc-devs-bounces@haskell.org>] On Behalf Of Alan & Kim Zimmerman Sent: 09 April 2015 22:15 To: ghc-devs@haskell.org<mailto:ghc-devs@haskell.org> Subject: Collapsing HsForAllTy, again With the help of Jan Stolarek I tracked down the HsForAllTy flattening to `HsTypes.mk_forall_ty`. This function takes any nested HsForAllTy's where the top one does not have a context defined, and collapses them into a single one. I do not know what the motivation for this is, and if it perhaps speeds up or simplifies further compilation. But now that API Annotations have arrived, making sure we do not lose the annotations for the sub-HsForAllTy causes significant gymnastics in the parser [1]. So my question is, is there a good reason to continue doing this, given the trade-off in parser complexity. Regards Alan [1] https://phabricator.haskell.org/D833