Now I can't tell whether you're teasing to keep this thread alive. If it is humour, it is lost on me.

Report section 6.4.1 Numeric Literals. "An integer literal represents the application of the function `fromInteger` to the appropriate value of type `Integer`."

OK. How do we write in Haskell that "appropriate value"?

To me that part of the report is obviously about compile-time code generation. The sentence itself is not recursive, it is "literal" versus "value". The two concepts live in different domains. Why do you think its meaning may be recursive? I imagine that when the compiler sees the literal 7, it de-sugars to (fromInteger (mkInteger ...)) where the inner expression is code from GHC.Integer that does not invoke fromInteger again. When the entire expression is to be of type Integer, then the fromInteger dictionary lookup replaces that by id. So the entire expression can be optimized to be whatever core expression generates the Integer seven, most likely S# 7#. Olaf