Henning Thielemann wrote:
I already told about by scepticism about using Ord for keys of maps and sets: http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/libraries/2007-April/007411.html
Yes. There are a number of different scenarios for the ordering that you want to use for indexing: 1. A default ordering for the type that is a natural ordering. 2. A default ordering for indexing that is not a natural ordering. 3. An application-specific ordering. 4. More than one ordering for the same type, determined statically. 5. More than one ordering for the same type, determined dynamically, i.e., parameterized orderings. My experience has been that all of these cases do come up quite often in real life. One solution would be to have Data.Map.Indexable, etc. as alternatives using Indexable instead of Ord, so that we could avoid newtype wrapping in case 2. We could allow for case 3 by not providing any default instances for Indexable. Or we could provide default instances in a separate module, Data.Indexable.Instances (or something), that you could choose whether or not to import. Newtype wrapping is still required in case 4, so Indexable doesn't add much here. We have not yet said anything helpful about case 5. -Yitz