According to the haskell-prime wiki[1], -XUndecidableInstances removes checks on the form of instance declaration, and just impose a depth limit to ensure termination (of compilation, I assume?). The listed Con is that this removes the clear boundary between legal and illegal programs, and behaviour may be implementation-dependent as the edge of that boundary is reached. How can I tell when I'm nearing that boundary? (And where are the sorts of things GHC does with types documented? I can't seem to find any good explanation of these things.) More specifically, I have class Model m a | m -> a where ... class Entropy d where ... instance (Model m a) => Entropy m where ... The first line requires MultiParamTypeClasses and FunctionalDependencies (the two seem to go together) - the third requires UndecidableInstances (since the type variable 'a' appears on the left but not the right). Is this likely to cause a problem? My guess is it shouldn't, since it's equivalent to class Model m a | m -> a where ... class Entropy d a where ... instance (Model m a) => Entropy m a where ... without bothering to actually use 'a' in Entropy - but one never knows... (Actually, a third type variable has to be introduced to Entropy to remove the UndecidableInstances dependency - "Constraint is no smaller than the instance head". This only increases the illogic in my humble eyes. These examples seem simple enough for GHC to handle nicely...) [1] http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/haskell-prime/wiki/UndecidableInstances -- Scott Lawrence