Ryan Ingram wrote:

I've been seeing this pattern in a surprising number of instance definitions lately:

instance (a ~ ar, b ~ br) => Mcomp a ar b br [1] instance (b ~ c, CanFilterFunc b a) => CanFilter (b -> c) a [2]

And here are a few more earlier instances of the same occurrence: http://okmij.org/ftp/Haskell/typecast.html

What I'm wondering is--are there many cases where you really want the non-constraint-generating behavior? It seems like (aside from contrived, ahem, instances) whenever you have instance CLASS A B where A and B share some type variables, that there aren't any valid instances of the same class where they don't share the types in that way.

Instances of the form class C a b class C a a class C a b are very characteristic of (emulation) of disequality constraints. Such instances occur, in a hidden form, all the time in HList -- when checking for membership in a type-level list, for example. There are naturally two cases: when the sought type is at the head of the list, or it is (probably) at the tail of the list. class Member (h :: *) (t :: List *) instance Member h (Cons h t) instance Member h t => Member h (Cons h' t) Of course instances above are overlapping. And when we add functional dependencies (since we really want type-functions rather type relations), they stop working at all. We had to employ work-arounds, which are described in detail in the HList paper (which is 8 years old already).