[ This is the second time I sent this, the first time it said it was awaiting moderation because I'm not subscribed to haskell-cafe, which is weird because I thought I was. Did a bunch of people get unsubscribed? ] I'm sure this is old-hat to typeclass wizards, but I've managed to get pretty far without understanding them too well, so here's a basic question. I haven't seen it phrased this way before though: I have a typeclass which is instantiated across a closed set of 3 types. It has an ad-hoc set of methods, and I'm not too happy with them because being a typeclass forces them to all be defined in one place, breaking modularity. A sum type, of course, wouldn't have that problem. But in other places I want the type-safety that separate types provide, and packing everything into a sum type would destroy that. So, expression problem-like, I guess. It seems to me like I should be able to replace a typeclass with arbitrary methods with just two, to reify the type and back. This seems to work when the typeclass dispatches on an argument, but not on a return value. E.g.: {-# LANGUAGE ScopedTypeVariables #-} class Taggable a where toTagged :: a -> Tagged toTaggedType :: a -> TaggedType fromTagged :: Tagged -> Maybe a m_argument :: a -> Int m_result :: Int -> a data Tagged = TInt Int | TChar Char deriving (Show) data TaggedType = TypeInt | TypeChar deriving (Show) instance Taggable Int where toTagged = TInt toTaggedType _ = TypeInt fromTagged (TInt x) = Just x fromTagged _ = Nothing m_argument = id m_result = id instance Taggable Char where toTagged = TChar toTaggedType _ = TypeChar fromTagged (TChar x) = Just x fromTagged _ = Nothing m_argument = fromEnum m_result = toEnum argument :: (Taggable a) => a -> Int argument a = case toTagged a of TInt x -> x TChar c -> fromEnum c result :: forall a. (Taggable a) => Int -> a result val = case toTaggedType (undefined :: a) of TypeInt -> val TypeChar -> toEnum val Say m_argument and m_result are the ad-hoc methods I'd like to get out of the typeclass. I can do that well enough for 'argument', but 'result' runs into trouble. One is the ugly undefined trick with toTaggedType, but the bigger one is that ghc says 'Could not deduce (a ~ Int) from the context (Taggable a)'. I wasn't really expecting it to work, because it would entail a case with multiple types. As far as I know, the only way for that to happen is with GADTs. But I don't see how they could help me here. So, perhaps my intuition was wrong. toTagged and fromTagged methods give you the power to go between value and type level, but apparently that's not enough power to express what typeclasses give you. Also it seems like there's a fundamental difference between dispatching on argument vs dispatching on result. Is there a way to more formally understand the extents of what typeclasses provide, and what a toTagged fromTagged scheme gives me, so I can have a better intuition for how to go between value and type levels? Also, the toTaggedType thing is pretty ugly. Not just passing it undefined, but how it has to repeat the types. I don't really see a way to get around that though.