Re: [Haskell-cafe] ANNOUNCE: vector-bytestring-0.0.0.0

On 15 October 2011 20:50, Ertugrul Soeylemez wrote:

Roman Leshchinskiy wrote:

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Personally, I think that ByteString and especially Vector Word8 aren't strings and shouldn't be treated as such. But I wouldn't be strongly against showing them as strings. However, I *am* strongly against using UndecidableInstances in vector and I don't see how to implement this without using them.

I meant OverlappingInstances, of course. To clarify, I would still consider it if everybody thinks it's a really good idea.

My suggestion was to remove the generic Show instance and add only specialized instances.  This is more work, but will also yield better results.  In particular, it allows specialized string representations for other types, too.

What exactly is the problem with using OverlappingInstances to define specialized Show and Read instances for Vectors with certain element types (Char, Word8, Bool)? Am I missing something dangerous here? Bas