Ok, so I have a small idea I'm trying to work on; call it a Prelude-rewrite if you want. For this I want to be able to have the hierarchy Functor → Applicative → Monad. For Functor, I would like to be able to implement it for a wider variety of types, as there are types which have aren't polymorphic which would also benefit from having an instance. My running example for this set of types is ByteString; the module contains the method: map ∷ (Word8 → Word8) → ByteString → ByteString However, we cannot use this for Functor because ByteString isn't polymorphic. To get around this, I devised the following: Introduce a type family which represents ‘points’ inside the type: type family Point f ∷ ★ For ByteString we have: type instance Point ByteString = Word8 For a polymorphic example (lists) we have: type instance Point [a] = a Now Functor becomes: class SimpleFunctor f where fmap ∷ (Point f → Point f) → (f → f) However, this doesn't allow for the existence of functions with the type (a → b). I need to introduce another type into the class: class Functor f g where fmap ∷ (Point f → Point g) → (f → g) But having two types isn't very nice (for one thing we can't introduce a fundep because for lists as it fails one of the coverage conditions), so introduce another type family to represent types which can be produced by giving a free variable: type Subst f a ∷ ★ type Subst [a] b = [b] type Subst ByteString b = ByteString class Functor f where fmap ∷ (Point f → Point (Subst f a)) → (f → Subst f a) I'm not sure how much of a hack this is, or if there is a better way. It seems to be OK... Now I want to implement Applicative. It would make sense to have ‘return’ be split out into a separate class, because this can be restricted in a similar way to Functor: class Pointed f where return ∷ Point f → f instance Pointed [a] where return x = [x] instance Pointed ByteString where return = BS.singleton Now, I want to be able to restrict Applicative to things which have [Pointed f, and forall a b. Point f ~ (a → b)]. At the moment I can't figure this out because I believe it would require something like the ‘quantified contexts’ proposal: class (Pointed f, ∀ a b. Point f ~ (a → b)) ⇒ Applicative f where ... I could have something like: class (Pointed f, Point f ~ (a → b)) ⇒ Applicative f a b where apply ∷ f → Subst f a → Subst f b This is still not very nice, because it requires two more type variables in the class, and the non-type-families version is far more straightforward... in fact, it makes sense for the Applicative class to have a polymorphic type because it must be able to have ‘return’ applied to arbitrary functions (remember [fmap f xs ≡ return f `apply` xs]). So back to: class Applicative f where apply ∷ f (a → b) → f a → f b But then ‘return’ cannot be added via a superclass restriction to Pointed! I seem to have painted myself into a corner. Does anyone see a better way to go about this? Thanks, - George