Ryan Ingram wrote:
My proposal is to allow "ad-hoc" overloading of names; if a name is ambiguous in a scope, attempt to type-check the expression against each name. It is only an error if type-checking against all names fails. If type-checking succeeds for more than one then the expression is ambiguous and this is also an error.
Pros: shorter code, less busywork to please the compiler Cons: potentially exponential compile time?
Any thoughts?
Now try importing something like Data.Map where almost every single function name clashes with the Prelude. If I write foo x = map (bar x) then unless there are some explicit type signatures somewhere, the poor compiler has no way of knowing whether this function is mapping over a list or a Map. (Arguably you might wish to write a function that does both. This quickly boils down to an argument along the lines of "Haskell doesn't support container neutrality very well", which as I understand it is already a known problem.)