To help me learn Applicative Functors and Functors I thought it would be good fun to see how Either is implemented with the typeclasses Functor and Applicative. Obviously I could just go ahead and read the code but I find it more useful to try and implement things myself to get a better understanding of things.

FYI I'm trying to implement the Haskell version of the results of this presentation http://applicative-errors-scala.googlecode.com/svn/artifacts/0.6/chunk-html/index.html

Anyway, this is what I have so far

 data Validation a b = Success a | Failure b deriving (Show, Eq)

 instance Functor (Validation a) where
     fmap f (Failure x) = Failure x
     fmap f (Success x) = Success (f x)

But whenever I try to run this with ghci I just get the following error message: -

[1 of 1] Compiling Main             ( t.hs, interpreted )

t.hs:5:35:
    Couldn't match type `b' with `a1'
      `b' is a rigid type variable bound by
          the type signature for
            fmap :: (a1 -> b) -> Validation a a1 -> Validation a b
          at t.hs:4:5
      `a1' is a rigid type variable bound by
           the type signature for
             fmap :: (a1 -> b) -> Validation a a1 -> Validation a b
           at t.hs:4:5
    Expected type: a
      Actual type: b
    In the return type of a call of `f'
    In the first argument of `Success', namely `(f x)'
    In the expression: Success (f x)

t.hs:5:37:
    Couldn't match type `a' with `a1'
      `a' is a rigid type variable bound by
          the instance declaration at t.hs:3:30
      `a1' is a rigid type variable bound by
           the type signature for
             fmap :: (a1 -> b) -> Validation a a1 -> Validation a b
           at t.hs:4:5
    In the first argume
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