[ghc-steering-committee] Re: Please review #698: Qualified Literals (under review)

I'm suggesting we simply don't have the latter at all, on the grounds that it's not worth the added complexity. It's just syntactic sugar after all - you don't get any new expressivity, only nicer syntax.

But the *entire thing* (OverloadedLists, OverloadedStrings etc) is "just about syntactic sugar". It's a pity to have syntactic sugar that ends up not doing the job! Let's see what others think. Committee members, speak up :-) Simon On Thu, 28 Aug 2025 at 11:58, Simon Marlow wrote:

On Thu, 28 Aug 2025 at 11:34, Simon Peyton Jones < simon.peytonjones@gmail.com> wrote:

...

the proposal is doing two things at the same time, namely

...

locally-rebindable-syntax for literals (very useful) and changes to numeric and list desugaring to increase power (also useful). Doing both of these at the same time feels like it will be another layer of complexity for people to run into.

Yes -- but since the additional bits are useful, the only alternative is to have -XQualifiedLiterals and -XQualifiedLiteralsMeaningSomethingABitDifferent, perhaps mutually exclusive, or perhaps the latter overrides the former? That also carries complexity.

I'm suggesting we simply don't have the latter at all, on the grounds that it's not worth the added complexity. It's just syntactic sugar after all - you don't get any new expressivity, only nicer syntax.

Cheers Simon

...

On balance I support the proposal as-is.

*Everyone: the clock is ticking: please read the proposal and express your view. *

Simon

On Wed, 27 Aug 2025 at 11:10, Simon Marlow wrote:

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Reading through the proposal it feels rather unsatisfying. Skimming the discussion it looks like others have raised exactly the points that bothered me: that the proposal is doing two things at the same time, namely locally-rebindable-syntax for literals (very useful) and changes to numeric and list desugaring to increase power (also useful). Doing both of these at the same time feels like it will be another layer of complexity for people to run into.

I would prefer to keep the desugaring exactly as it is (albeit limited for some use cases) and have qualified literals manage scoping only. Trivial to explain. Not as powerful.

If people really want the whole proposal as is, then I guess I'm mildly negative but won't put up strong opposition.

Cheers Simon

On Wed, 20 Aug 2025 at 11:25, Erik de Castro Lopo via ghc-steering-committee wrote:

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Hi Committee,

Discussion on this proposal has died down again so I have switched it back to "pending committee review".

I have just re-read the current rendered version and suggest that we should accept this proposal.

Cheers, Erik

Erik de Castro Lopo via ghc-steering-committee wrote:

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Hi All,

I have been assigned as shepherd for this proposal.

There is still quite a bit of discussion on the GH issue and the text was updated as little as a week ago.

As shepherd, I am currently on the fence on this one (leaning towards "accept"), for the same reason brought up by @Bodgrim in the ticket and due to ever increasing complexity. I think it should remain under revision until the GH chatter dies down a bit.

Cheers, Erik

Adam Gundry via ghc-steering-committee wrote:

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Dear Committee,

Brandon Chinn proposes to introduce new extensions for qualified number, string and list literals:

https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/pull/698

https://github.com/brandonchinn178/ghc-proposals/blob/qualified-literals/pro...

...

I'd like to nominate Erik as the shepherd.

Please guide us to a conclusion as outlined in

https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/blob/master/README.rst#commit...

...

(thanks Sebastian for pointing out the previously broken link)

Cheers,

Adam

-- Adam Gundry, Haskell Consultant Well-Typed LLP, https://www.well-typed.com/

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