Re: [Haskell-cafe] resolving missing class instances @ compile time

Bernard Pope wrote:

Perhaps this section of the report might help:

...

From Section "4.3.2 Instance Declarations" in the Haskell Report:

http://www.haskell.org/onlinereport/decls.html#instance-decls

"If no binding is given for some class method then the corresponding default class method in the class declaration is used (if present); if such a default does not exist then the class method of this instance is bound to undefined and no compile-time error results."

I may be missing the big picture, but why is this behavior more desirable than failing with an error at compile time? Greg Buchholz