Any chance to express this in terms of a formal (constraint rewrite framework). For example, the Haskell rule, do *not* display implied superclasses, can be specified as follows. Consider the special case of class Eq a class Eq a => Ord a Eq a, Ord a <=> Ord a The above rule only applies *after* type inference took place. Martin John Meacham wrote:
This isn't really a response to your email, but I have been mulling the last few hours away from a computer and wanted to get this stream of conciousness out when it is fresh in my mind.
The more I think about it, I think 'superclass' is just the wrong terminology for dealing with class aliases. Superclass implies a strict partial order on classes, which just isn't the case for class aliases, for instance
class alias Foo a => Foo a = Bar a where ...
Has a defined (if not very useful) meaning with class aliases, but is really odd if you consider 'Foo a' a "superclass". So, I think the following terminology should be used:
Context of --+ alias | The alias -+ +--- The expansion of the alias | | | v v v
class alias (S1 a .. Sn a) => A a = (C1 a ... Cn a) where fd1 = .... .... fdn = ....
^ +---- The defaults of the alias
given this, the expansion of 'A a' in any context other than an instance head is
A a --> reduce(S1 a .. Sn a, C1 a ... Cn a)
where reduce is standard entailment reduction on class contexts (like (Eq a,Ord a, Eq a) reduces to (Ord a))
This expansion is carried out iteratively on all class aliases until a fixed point is reached, then all class aliases are deleted from the result and the remaining context is the final result. (This will always terminate due to there being a finite number of class aliases that can be pulled into the expansion)
likewise, for instance declarations:
instance A a where ...
-->
foreach C in C1 .. Cn: instance (S1 a ... Sn a) => C a where ...
I left out the default methods here. I need to think about them a bit more to come up with a formal expansion as it is a bit trickier (to typeset if nothing else), but I hope this is somewhat more clear for some...
John