So, this has probably been asked before, but out of curiosity, given:
instance IsList Text where
type Item Text = Char
fromList = Text.pack
toList = Text.unpack
What is the relationship to OverloadedStrings? Since "blah" is sugar for ['b','l','a','h'], could OverloadedLists also work for string literals / string patterns?
It's described in the wiki. OverloadedLists could subsume OverloadedStrings if the former had an statically allocated compact representation for certain lists, which we have for Strings today (see unpackCString#).