New instance declaration for Show
Replace your last line with:
instance Show Prediction where
show = showPrediction
To derive an instance, the syntax is
instance «preconditions» => Class «type» where
«method» = «definition»
So here, for instance, you'd have
instance Show Prediction where
show (Prediction a b c) = show a ++ "-" ++ show b ++ "-" ++ show c
There's no precondition; you'd use that for something like instance Show a => Show [a] where ...
, which says that if a
is showable, then so is [a]
. Here, all Predictions
are showable, so there's nothing to worry about. When you wrote instance Show (Prediction p) => showPrediction p
, you made a few mistakes. First, Prediction p
implies that Prediction
is a parametrized type (one declared by, for instance, data Prediction a = Prediction a a a
), which it isn't. Second, Show (Prediction p) =>
implies that if Prediction P
is showable, then you want to declare some other instance. And third, after the =>
, having a function is nonsensical—Haskell wanted a type class name.
Also, for completeness's sake, there's another way to derive Show
if you want the Prediction 1 2 3
format for displayed output:
data Prediction = Prediction Int Int Int deriving Show
As specified in the Haskell 98 report, there are only a handful of types which can be derived this way: Eq
, Ord
, Enum
, Bounded
, Show
, and Read
. With the appropriate GHC extensions, you can also derive Data
, Typeable
, Functor
, Foldable
, and Traversable
; you can derive any class which a newtype
's wrapped type derived for a newtype
; and you can generate these automatic instances in a standalone way.
You've got the syntax for instances wrong. To create an instance of Show
write:
instance Show Foo where
show = ...
-- or
show x = ...
where ...
contains your definition of the show
function for Foo
.
So in this case you want:
instance Show Prediction where
show = showPrediction
or, since there isn't an important reason to have showPrediction
at all:
instance Show Prediction where
show (Prediction a b c) = show a ++ "-" ++ show b ++ "-" ++ show c