Hi, I've just started learning Haskell, and I must admit I'm finding it a bit hard to get my head around the typing system... If I wanted to represent Employees and Departments in a Haskell program I could use data declarations like so: data Employee = Emp ... data Department = Dept ... This seems limited in (at least) two ways: I can't dynamically add fields to an employee or department, and once I pull a field out of an instance I lose type information. What I want to be able to do is add and remove fields while the system is running, I suppose via hs-plugins, and I should be prevented from, for example, accidentally taking an employees first name and using it as a departments address. My first attempt was the following, which isn't even valid and doesn't appear to buy me much anyway. class DataContainer c class DataContainer c => DataField f c a where extract :: f -> a apply :: (a -> a -> a) -> f -> f -> f data DataContainer c => Field c a = Fld c a instance DataField Field c a where extract (Fld _ a) = a apply f (Fld c a1) (Fld _ a2) = Fld c (f a1 a2) data Employee = Emp instance DataContainer Employee data Department = Dept instance DataContainer Department type EmployeeName = Field Employee String type EmployeeAddress = Field Employee String type EmployeeIdentifier = Field Employee Integer type DepartmentAddress = Field Department String type DepartmentIdentifier = Field Department Integer ... The 'DataField instance Field' declaration gives kind errors regarding how many type arguments Field is applied to. I don't claim to understand kinds at this point. Even if it did work, apply doesn't appear to force the arguments to be of the same type, and the declared type synonyms aren't enough to prevent me getting employee names and addresses confused. Is there a correct way to express what I'm trying to do? Or is it a bad idea to start with? Thanks Karl