| On that note, I've been finding GHC's type suggestions often worse | than useless, and wish it wouldn't even bother to try -- even more | confusing for new users to have the compiler suggest pointless things | like declaring an instance of Num String or whatever. I'd prefer it | if it could just tell me what *specific* part of an expression, which | symbol even, the expected and inferred values differed. On the other | hand, when trying to guess at operator precedence rules, the "applied | to too many" and "applied to too few" errors are actually pretty handy. It's difficult to make error messages helpful. The best improvement mechanism I know is this: when you come across a case where GHC produces an unhelpful message, send it in, along with the program that produced it, AND your suggestion for the error message you'd like to have seen. I don't promise instant action, but if you suffer in silence then nothing will improve. Sending a message keeps it on our radar *and* provides an example to motivate improvements. (Boiling the program down a bit is a help, so you don't have to send a massive tarball.) Another thing that can be worth a try is to try your boiled-down program with Helium, whose error-message infrastructure has received much more conscious design attention than GHC's. Simon