Friends The use of flags to control rewrite rules in GHC is very confusing. Several bug reports arise from this. There is a summary here: http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/2497 The final comment is a proposal, which I append below. This email is just to allow others to comment on the proposed change. It's all minor and tiresome, but I don't want to change it and then find it's still awkward. NB: please read the whole ticket if you want to comment on these proposals. And add your comments to the ticket. Simon * Do not add -XRewriteRules. A RULE is in a pragma, and so is silently ignored by other compilers anyway. Other pragmas like SPECIALISE do not have a language extension flag. They will generate errors if they are plain wrong (e.g. variables out of scope). But adding a language flag would be inconsistent. * Inside a RULE, switch on the forall-as-keyword in the lexer, unconditionally. Simon M will do this, and send a patch to Simon PJ for validation. * Merge the -XScopedTypeVariables and -XPatternSignatures flags. Distinguishing them isn't senseless, but it's jolly confusing. * Inside a RULE, switch on -XScopedTypeVariables unconditionally. * Change -frewrite-rules to -fuse-rewrite-rules; deprecate the former.