The issue with local instances is very complicated one. First, they are sorely missed. However, they present quite a problem. Let us assume they are implemented and consider the following function f1 :: Int -> String f1 x = let instance Show Int where show _ = "one" in show x I think we all agree (f1 1) should evaluate to "one". However, given f2 :: Show a => a -> String f2 x = let instance Show Int where show _ = "one" in show x what should (f2 (1::Int)) return? One answer is that it should still return "one" -- that is, local instances should sort of form a closure (like local variables in the real closure). That is a good answer, but may lead to unpleasant surprises because the fact of the closure is not at all reflected in the type of the function. Consider data T = T f3 :: Show a => a -> String f3 x = let instance Show T where show _ = "T" in show x and take the closure semantics. The type says that to make (f3 T) well-typed, there has to be an instance Show T in scope. The user of f3 has no way to know of the private local instance that is closed over (short of examining the source code). Since the user knows there is no global instance T, the user attempts to define in. The user will be quite surprised to discover that (f3 T) is well-typed but their global instance Show T has no effect. Let us assume the opposite of the closure semantics -- local instances are not closed. So, local instances should behave sort of dynamically scoped variables (which are not captured in closures). Therefore, (f2 (1::Int)) should return "1". Such a choice is also problematic. Suppose GHC, seeing our call to f2, notices that the polymorphic f2 is called at type Int and decides, to save time on indirect dictionary calls, to specialize f2 to the type Int. So, GHC will generate a specialized instance of f2: f2_Int :: Int -> String f2_Int x = let instance Show Int where show _ = "one" in show x and we have already decided that (f2_Int 1), should return "one" rather than "1" (since f2_Int looks just like f1). Previously, specialization of a function was easy to understand: GHC may, at will, create a copy of a polymorphic function and instantiate it at a specific type. Then all calls to the polymorphic function at that specific type are replaced with the calls to the specialized function. The user can even do such a specialization themselves. With unclosed local instances, such a specialization changes the program behavior. We have to complicate the matters. Further, what should (f4 (1::Int)) return? f4 :: Show a => a -> String f4 x = let instance Show Int where show _ = "two" in f2 x Stefan Kaes, the person who introduced ``parametric overloading'' (type classes, in modern term) chose the ``closure semantics''. His system and prototype implementation had only local instances (and even local type classes). http://okmij.org/ftp/Computation/typeclass.html#Kaes Perhaps the most comprehensive treatment of local instances is the old paper D. Duggan and J. Ophel. Open and closed scopes for constrained genericity (PDF). Theoretical Computer Science, 275, 215-258, 2002. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=570578 They propose a method to have both closure and non-closure semantics, differentiating based on so-called open and closed types. Our HW 2004 paper with Chung-chieh Shan proposed a way to elide the problem by restricting the local instances in such a way that the problem never arises. The `reflection' facility was used to implement such local instances. The idea was that local instances can be thought of as ordinary global instances; however, the scope of the type in their head is restricted. That is, rather than make the instances local we make local the type for which they are defined (or one of the types, for multi-parameter type classes). Local types can be emulated via first-class polymorphism. (BTW, if one can leave with unsafeCoerce, local instances can be much more efficiently implemented.) Gesh wrote:

* Give up on non-associated open type families. This I have researched less well, but it seems to me that these have no use case. Since one can make whatever instances one wishes for these type families, one can't do anything useful with values of their instances.

On the contrary, we found them very useful in defining interpreters that provide their own interpretation of not only primitives but also of types. http://okmij.org/ftp/gengo/NASSLLI10/index.html See, for example, http://okmij.org/ftp/gengo/NASSLLI10/Lambda.hs for partial evaluation and http://okmij.org/ftp/gengo/NASSLLI10/CFG.hs In the latter case, extensibility is particularly important as we do want to add further syntactic categories and their semantic interpretations.