However, in ghc-5.02.3 for Haskell 98 (without glasgow extensions) it seems that is not the case. I _guessed_ that I need to use the flag -fno-monomorphism-restriction but I don't know whether I've failed to turn it on or if the problem is to be found somewhere else. A related problem I've found is that if I try to specify that flag in a pragma, I get an error message stating that static flags may not be specified in pragmas, and yet the flag is supposed to be dynamic.

-fno-monomorphism-restriction was a static flag by mistake. The bugfix will be in 5.04. Cheers, Simon