Jens Blanck schrieb:
I was wondering if someone could give me some references to when and why the choice was made to default integral numerical literals to Integer rather than to Int in Haskell. Also, if you are aware of similar discussions in other languages. I think type defaulting is only an issue for GHCi because in compiled code you should not let the compiler and reader of your code guess the type. GHC -Wall warns about uses of default types.
I'd like to use this information to make an analogous case for defaulting real numerical literals (well, the literals are likely to be in scientific notation, i.e., floating point) to some data type of computable reals rather than to floating point Double. You might be interested in http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Libraries_and_tools/Mathematics#Real_and_...