Anthony Clayden wrote:
So three questions in light of the approach of abandoning FunDeps and therefore not getting interference with overlapping: A. Does TTypeable need to be so complicated? B. Is TTypeable needed at all? C. Does the 'simplistic' version of type equality testing suffer possible IncoherentInstances?
It is important to keep in mind that Type Families (and Data Families) are _strictly_ more expressive than Functional dependencies. For example, there does not seem to be a way to achieve the injectivity of Leibniz equality http://okmij.org/ftp/Computation/extra-polymorphism.html#injectivity without type families (and relaying instead on functional dependencies, implemented with TypeCast or directly). I'd like to be able to write data Foo a = Foo (SeqT a) where SeqT Bool = Integer SeqT a = [a] otherwise (A sequence of Booleans is often better represented as an Integer). A more practical example is http://okmij.org/ftp/Haskell/GMapSpec.hs http://okmij.org/ftp/Haskell/TTypeable/GMapSpecT.hs It is possible to sort of combine overlapping with associated types, but is quite ungainly. It is not possible to have overlapping associated types _at present_. Therefore, at present, TTYpeable is necessary and it has to be implemented as it is. You point out New Axioms. They will change things. I have to repeat my position however, which I have already stated several times. TTypeable needs no new features from the language and it is available now. There is no problem of figuring out how TTypeable interacts with existing features of Haskell since TTypeable is implemented with what we already have. New Axioms add to the burden of checking how this new feature interacts with others. There have been many examples when one feature, excellent by itself, badly interacts with others. (I recall GADT and irrefutable pattern matching.)