With the prelude changes that people have been discussing recently I've been wondering is there any reason why importing an identifier explicitly and unqualified doesn't automatically hide any implicit imports of the same identifier? Specifically I'm wondering about cases where you've imported an identifier explicitly from only one module, like this: module Foo (x, ...) where { ... } module Bar (x, ...) where { ... } import Bar import Foo (x) Even if you needed a pragma to enable it I can't think of any sensible reason why that shouldn't be equivalent to: import Bar hiding (x) import Foo (x) I don't know much of GHC's internals, but it seems like a pretty minimal change. Typing rules remain the same; explicit imports just shadow implicits. So importing multiple identifiers both implicitly or both explicitly would remain ambiguous.