I suppose that could be changed, yes, but what exactly are we trying to solve 
here? One can already specify different behavior for constructors with/without 
named fields. Are we trying to avoid OverlappingInstances? Then yes, this might 
help, but I'm not sure this change alone would make all generic programming 
possible without OverlappingInstances.

To be clear, I wasn't advocating a change, just saying that there's no GHC-HQ 
imperative to avoid them.

Simon

From: José Pedro Magalhães [mailto:j...@cs.uu.nl]
Sent: 21 June 2011 09:01
To: Simon Peyton-Jones
Cc: David Mazieres expires 2011-07-21 PDT; o...@okmij.org; ccs...@rutgers.edu; 
Dimitrios Vytiniotis; haskell-prime@haskell.org
Subject: Re: TypeFamilies vs. FunctionalDependencies & type-level recursion

Hi,
2011/6/21 Simon Peyton-Jones 
<simo...@microsoft.com<mailto:simo...@microsoft.com>>
| One thing you could do to help in this specific case would be to use a
| different M1 tag--e.g., M1 S ... for selectors and M1 NS ... for
| fields without selectors (or K1 NS).  I presume you've already
| considered this and/or it's too late to make such a change.  (Or to
| move the distinction up to the constructor with two different
| constructor tags, CR and CN for record and no-record.)
I don't think it's too late to make a change.  The stuff has only just gone in, 
so it's still very malleable.  There may be other considerations, but legacy 
code isn't one of them!

I suppose that could be changed, yes, but what exactly are we trying to solve 
here? One can already specify different behavior for constructors with/without 
named fields. Are we trying to avoid OverlappingInstances? Then yes, this might 
help, but I'm not sure this change alone would make all generic programming 
possible without OverlappingInstances.

(Also, I always thought UndecidableInstances were "more evil", in some sense, 
and this change does nothing to remove the use of UndecidableInstances for 
generic programming.)


Cheers,
Pedro

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