On 7 Apr 2008, at 21:15, Dan Weston wrote:
To answer your second question (which everyone else ignored):
Yes. A different keyword might have been more descriptive, such as "automatically_deriving_instances_for".
They are called instantiations, which Haskell can supply automatically in some cases. And there is already a keyword "instance" for that - in general, it is good to keep down the number of keywords. So data Bool = False | True instance (Eq, Ord, Enum, Read, Show, Bounded) might have been better. But here, one would have to think about how the compiler should be able to distinguish data Bool = False | True instance (Eq) from data Bool = False | True instance Eq Bool where x == y = ... One wants to be able to do that with as little lookahead as possible. Hans Aberg