Hello Neil, Sunday, September 10, 2006, 2:21:50 PM, you wrote:

...

class Monad m | Functor m, Monoid m where ... It also makes grep'ing easier.

yes, i also had problems finding class declarations in base package

...

sequence :: [m a] -> m [a] | Monad m

I don't like this. In the other two instances you are moving the most important information (the name of the thing) to the front. In this the name is at the front, but the instances move to the end, which isn't really where they should be. And following the function | rule

function | predicates = body

I would have said that logically, you want:

sequence | Monad m :: [m a] -> m [a]

(of course, this might present a problem for parsing...)

Note this also makes sense compared to your:

data Data | Classes = Alternatives

you have omitted "patterns, or parameters shape" part: function shapes_of_parameters | guards_for_parameters = result so, in my proposal: data T a b | Eq a, Monad b = .... and function signature obey the same rule - first write shape of function type, then narrow type variables used to some classes: addEncoding :: Encoding m -> h -> m (WithEncoding m h) | Monad m, ByteStream m h Of course, that's more important is readability. it's discussible whether we need to know that m is monad and h is stream before reading shape of function type btw, the following is anyway most readable: sequence :: [Monad a] -> Monad [a] ;) -- Best regards, Bulat mailto:Bulat.Ziganshin@gmail.com