Re: [Haskell-cafe] Why Maybe exists if there is Either?

But instance declarations wouldn't be needed because we already have all the instances for Either. The point would be to have them unified. Consider a generic Show instance for Either – there’s no way¹ to make it behave differently for Either () (or Maybe if it was a type synonym). I

On 01/09/2014 08:36 PM, Vlatko Basic wrote: think there are other cases in which we want Maybe to behave differently from Either, but I can’t think of any on the spot. ¹ this point also applies to String, which is a type synonym for [Char] – and it was solved somewhat inelegantly by adding an additional method to Show typeclass *specifically* for showing lists of things.