Heinrich Apfelmus schrieb:
Sure, overloading is useful. But to avoid headache in a polymorphic language, I'd prefer a principled approach to it. Hence, I'm convinced that there should be only one mechanism for overloading in Haskell; which is type classes at the moment.
It appears that type direction name disambiguation can be implemented with (automatically generated) type classes?
When thinking about how to make Haskell familiar to SQL programmers I also thought that a Haskell compiler might automatically generate a type class and according instances, such that an identifier like 'field' can be used for all record types that have a field with name 'field'. I'm sure Template Haskell programmers can achieve this already with todays GHC. In the meantime I'm happy with writing qualifications, type signatures and so on. I don't know why people like to avoid them at all costs.