Hi all, I have recently tried to replicate some examples from in the articles about type families but found some possible bugs. In [2], the example class C a where type S a (k :: * -> *) :: * instance C [a] where type S [a] k = (a,k a) does not compile under the claim that the type variable k is not in scope. However, if we extract the type family from the class type family S a (k :: * -> *) :: * type instance S [a] k = (a, k a) class C a it compiles correctly. According to [3], the difference is purely syntactic sugar, does that mean that both examples should compile and behave the same or is there some subtlety that justifies the class example not to compile? Another issue is that data kinds (used in both [2] and [3]) do not seem to be supported at all by the compiler, are they already implemented in GHC? Simple examples such as datakind Nat = Zero or datakind Nat = Zero | Succ Nat fail to compile. Perhaps some of these should be submitted to the GHC Bug Tracker. I have tested both GHC 6.8.2 and 6.9.20080218. References: 1. Associated Types with Class.http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~chak/papers/CKPM05.html Manuel M. T. Chakravarty, Gabriele Keller, Simon Peyton Jones, and Simon Marlow. In *Proceedings of The 32nd Annual ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL'05)*, pages 1-13, ACM Press, 2005. 2. Associated Type Synonyms.http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~chak/papers/CKP05.html Manuel M. T. Chakravarty, Gabriele Keller, and Simon Peyton Jones. In *Proceedings of The Tenth ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming *, ACM Press, pages 241-253, 2005. 3. Towards Open Type Functions for Haskell.http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~chak/papers/SSPC07.html Tom Schrijvers, Martin Sulzmann, Simon Peyton-Jones, and Manuel M. T. Chakravarty. Unpublished manuscript, 2007.