Simon Peyton-Jones wrote: | I'm very sympathetic to the idea of making it possible | to do entirely without the standard Prelude, and to | substitute a Prelude of one's own. I think this is a very good idea. | Some while ago I modified GHC to have an extra runtime | flag to let you change this behaviour. The effect was | that 3 turns into simply (fromInt 3), and the | "fromInt" means "whatever fromInt is in scope". Hmmm... so how about: foo fromInt = 3 Would this translate to: foo f = f 3 ? How about alpha renaming? | [...] guarantee that (if otherwise e1 e2) = e1. I do not understand this. "otherwise" is simply a function name, that can be used, redefined or hidden, by anyone. It is not used in any desugaring. Why change that behaviour? | It's always hard to know how to deploy finite | design-and-implementation resources. Is this stuff | important to a lot of people? I think it is important to define a minimalistic Prelude, so that people at least know what is standard and what is not. Try to put everything else in modules. /Koen. -- Koen Claessen http://www.cs.chalmers.se/~koen phone:+46-31-772 5424 mailto:koen@cs.chalmers.se ----------------------------------------------------- Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden