Ivan Lazar Miljenovic writes:

On 29 November 2011 07:28, Daniel Díaz Casanueva wrote:

...

Hi Cafe,

I only feel curious about what would be the consequences of becoming the Overloaded Strings feature (currently, an extension) to be default in Haskell. This is not a proposal. I just want to know what pros and cons there are.

One cons would be that you may need some more explicit type signatures being used: I have the situation in my graphviz library where both Text and String have instances of some classes (e.g. Labellable, which has a method toLabel :: (Labellable a) => a -> Label) which result in explicit "String" values in the source code result in the compiler not knowing which instance to use (e.g. toLabel "hi").

Though that could be ameliorated by allowing defaulting with a default default (if you will) of String. -- Jón Fairbairn Jon.Fairbairn@cl.cam.ac.uk