Am Dienstag, 22. April 2008 09:33 schrieb Simon Peyton-Jones:
[…]
One reason I've failed to do so is because I have not come under enough pressure! If I thought there were dozens of people slavering at the chops for class aliases, that would put it more firmly on my radar.
I would really, really like to see class aliases (or something similar) in GHC! For example, I’m currently writing lecture notes for a functional programming lecture. During this process I had to see again how unattractive it is that Functor and Applicative aren’t superclasses of Monad. You have to teach your students some historical background in order to make sense of this fact. Even if Functor would have been made a Monad superclass in Haskell 98, the post-98 introduction of Applicative would have prevented it from being a superclass of Monad. I think, we should have the possibility to refine class hierarchies later.
[…]
Best wishes, Wolfgang