But that's precisely what the Alternative class is already for! If you are writing an Alternative instance at all, then you are asserting that it must be possible and reasonable to replicate the existing behaviour of some and many.

The fact that those functions are currently methods of the class is completely irrelevant, and perhaps this is a source of your confusion. They can be - and used to be - implemented as normal functions with Alternative class constraints, then at some point someone moved them into the class itself, solely to allow implementors to write faster versions.

I think we should take any further discussion off-list. Your messages from last night betray a deep misunderstanding that I'm not sure everyone else needs to sit through :-)