It is a blatant violation of the Haskell Report ("A type may not be declared as an instance of a particular class more than once in the
Meanwhile, all I want to do is relax instantiation from "a single instance matches and no other instance unifies" to "a single instance unifies and no other instance unifies". This is only interesting in
#12240: Common Sense for Type Classes -------------------------------------+------------------------------------- Reporter: Mathnerd314 | Owner: Type: feature request | Status: new Priority: normal | Milestone: Component: Compiler | Version: 8.0.1 Resolution: | Keywords: Operating System: Unknown/Multiple | Architecture: Type of failure: GHC rejects | Unknown/Multiple valid program | Test Case: Blocked By: | Blocking: Related Tickets: | Differential Rev(s): Wiki Page: | -------------------------------------+------------------------------------- Comment (by rwbarton): program."), yet it compiles in GHC with no extensions. Yes, so it is a bug. See #2356. limited situations, such as the example in comment:4, and leaves all Haskell 98 instances unchanged. I do not see how it adds any incoherence, because in both rules only a single instance is allowed. Your proposal seems to even allow situations like {{{#!hs class C a b where f :: a -> Int instance C String () where f _ = 1 instance C String Bool where f _ = 2 }}} If the two instances are in different modules, the expression `f "a" :: Int` will type check but have value `1` or `2` depending on which module is imported. Yet the instances are not even overlapping. -- Ticket URL: http://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/12240#comment:10 GHC http://www.haskell.org/ghc/ The Glasgow Haskell Compiler