Yesterday I read the Typeclassopedia [again]. In the course of doing this, I discovered that several types have class instances that do something useful. (Indeed, some of these instances do things that I've written custom functions to do.) The trouble is, when you read the documentation, it might say something like data Foo instance Monoid Foo This tells me that Foo is an instance of Monoid. It utterly fails to tell me what the heck the Monoid instance actually *does*. Now, sometimes it's quite obvious. (E.g., just about the only binary operation on lists is (++).) But sometimes it's not less obvious, and sometimes it's so utterly mystifying that just about the only way to find the answer is to either read the source code or run example code and try to deduce some kind of pattern in the answers. In summary, I think we need to devise a way of better-documenting class instances. Sometimes important functionallity can only be accessed using a class, and if it isn't too obvious what a particular class instance does, you can miss that functionallity and end up implementing it again by hand. (Or worse, thinking it's just impossible.) And there's also little quirks like the way Eq usually means value-equality, but for mutable structures it's usually defined as reference-equality. And then of course there are non-standard user-defined classes and their instances...