Do you think 'read' (actually, 'readsPrec'?) could be made to also read the international convention (ie., read "1,5" would also work besides read "1.5")?
No, as read is really intended to be a language-level tool, not something that you should expose to end users. For locale-aware number input and formatting, you'd want to do something else.
Sure. What I think would be great if possible would be a language-level tool. The same way '.' can be used as decimal separator even if it's the function composition operator. If it's not possible to change the syntax, changing 'read' could be a good step (since, sometimes, 'read' is a good way to inialize some variables if proper care is taken. I know this sound weird, but it is an issue, for instance, when teaching programming. Students who face programming classes usually start writing numbers the wrong way, and sometimes this leads to confusion. A similar problem we had in the days when zeros were cut so they would be different of O, and now we have a lot of grown up people still writing 0 as if it were a greek phi. (As my father used to complain, when his students had to write something like phi=0.) Read and Show are, IMHO, a great way to initialize variables. a = read "123" is an alternative to a = 123, and maybe even a replacement. If, for instance, both show and read used some kind of delimiter, it would be easy to use reasonable ways to write constants of any kind. A big effort, but not less than is needed for unicode support in strings, and almost as usefull. Thanks, Maurício