<div dir="ltr">Just to throw another curveball at this conversation, what about a general, ad-hoc solution for 'typeclass defaults'? The logic goes like this: Is there an "ambiguous type variable" error due to the use of the IsString typeclass? Try defaulting to the String instance. If that doesn't work, try defaulting to Text. Repeat for a finite, explicit list of instances. If none of these defaults are successful, type error.<div>
<br></div><div>We have hard-coded this sort of behavior into the Num class. Why not just provide this general capability for arbitrary classes? Or at least hard-code it into IsString as well.</div><div><br></div><div>In the absence of this sort of solution, +1 to Edward's original proposal.</div>
<div><br></div><div>The "o" proposal is not viable because the oft-needed parens make it confusing and irritating to the new Haskeller.</div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br clear="all"><div>-- Dan Burton</div>
<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Aug 26, 2013 at 12:41 PM, Henning Thielemann <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:lemming@henning-thielemann.de" target="_blank">lemming@henning-thielemann.de</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div class="im"><br>
On Mon, 26 Aug 2013, Gabriel Gonzalez wrote:<br>
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I'm guessing this is sarcastic, but I just want to clarify what I understood Henning's proposal to be. He's not saying we should provide an `o` function in the standard library, but rather encourage users to define their own.<br>
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Yes. I would be ok if packages provide this function, but I would urge programmers to import that explicitly.<div class="im"><br>
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<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
This one liner would take the place of the current line that they devote right now to `OverloadedStrings` .<br>
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right<div class="im"><br>
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<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
However, the analogy is still apt since the exact same line of reasoning applies to overloaded numeric<br>
literals where we currently rely on defaulting to solve this problem.<br>
</blockquote>
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I always use -Wall and thus I am warned about when defaulting takes place. Thus I am confident that I do not rely on defaulting in my code.<br>
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