Thanks for these pointers, Ken.  And belated thanks to Oleg for his reply in June.  Impressive tricks!

Perhaps I'm not the only person who'd prefer a more straightforward formulation of backtracking search?  Cheers,

  - Conal

On 7/31/07, Chung-chieh Shan <ccshan@post.harvard.edu> wrote:
Conal Elliott <conal@conal.net> wrote in article <ea8ae9fb0707311208j9f3fcf7m92bef8f54aea3dd8@mail.gmail.com > in gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general:
> I keep running into situations in which I want more powerful search in
> selecting type class instances.

I agree that it's quite useful for instance search to backtrack, if not
desirable in all cases.  Proof search is program search, after all.

Of course, allowing undecidable instances, we can build backtracking
into instance search ourselves by representing the state of a
backtracking machine as a type.   http://okmij.org/ftp/Haskell/poly2.txt

--
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And if thou gaze into the abyss, the abyss...actually finds you pretty creepy.

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