On 2017-01-24 03:07 AM, Chris Smith wrote:
Anyone want to offer some early feedback on a GHC proposal I'm working on? It's called OverloadedApplication. Current version at https://github.com/cdsmith/ghc-proposals/blob/overloadedapplication/proposal...
I like the proposal overall. One question you haven't addressed is whether the backtick syntax `f` should apply to all IsFunction instances, or only to functions like now. You should also explain what you expect to happen if the {-# LANGUAGE OverloadedApplication #-} pragma is plunked on top of an existing module and some IsFunction instances imported. Do you expect any Haskell2010 module to remain completely unaffected? If so, I presume there must be some defaulting rules to prefer the plain old function application.
I'd love to get early thoughts from anyone who has a solid use case for the rest of the proposal. It feels like a thing that *ought* to be useful, but I'm drawing blanks at the moment.
I haven't looked into it deeply, but it may be possible to re-implement something like the idiom brackets (for a particular Applicative instance) using this proposal.