The problem is that your definition of arbitrary for the Building instance isn’t indented under the ‘instance Arbitrary Building’, so it’s getting interpreted as two top-level statements: one that Building is an Arbitrary of Instance, and one that defines a value named ‘arbitrary’. Hence the error message. To fix this, just indent the definition of arbitrary like you did in the Glass definition. On Tuesday, November 26, 2013 at 11:06 AM, Kees Bleijenberg wrote:

I have a Building with a field glass: Glass. I want to use quickcheck. Therefor I wrote a TestGlass.hs with the Arbitrary instance declaration for Glass. I also want to make Building an instance of Arbitrary. For the field glass in the Building I need the arbitrary :: Gen Glass function out of TestGlass.hs. How do I export and use the instance declarations from TestGlass.hs?

Glass.hs module Glass( Glass(..)) where data Glass = Glass Int

TestGlass.hs module TestGlass() where import Test.QuickCheck import Test.QuickCheck.Gen import Glass

instance Arbitrary Glass where arbitrary = do n <- choose (1,8) :: Gen Int return $ Glass n

Building.hs module Building () where import Glass import TestGlass import Test.QuickCheck import Test.QuickCheck.Gen

data Building = Building { glass :: Glass } instance Arbitrary Building where arbitrary = do g <- arbitrary :: (Gen Glass) return Building { glass = g}

When I compile Building I get: Building.hs:13:23: Ambiguous occurrence `arbitrary' It could refer to either `Building.arbitrary', defined at Building.hs:12:1 or `Test.QuickCheck.arbitrary', imported from `Test.QuickCheck' at Building.hs:5:1-22 (and originally defined in `Test.QuickCheck.Arbitrary')

It looks like the compiler doesn’t look at the instance declarations in the TestGlass module. What is wrong in my code? I want to split the testcode as much as possible from the non-test code and I don’t want to merge the modules Building and Glass (they are both already big).

Kees

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