Folks, The current proposal on the table for what to do about the monomorphism restriction (henceforth MR) is * remove the MR entirely * adopt Monomorphic Pattern Bindings (MPB) Right now, the committee is almost uniformly in favour of dropping the MR, and most of us are coming round to the idea of MPB. Since this area has historically been difficult to achieve a concensus on, I'm excited that we appear to be close to making a decision, and a good one at that! The arguments for removing the MR are pretty well summarised on the wiki: http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/haskell-prime/wiki/MonomorphismRestriction You can read about MPB here: http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/haskell-prime/wiki/MonomorphicPatternBinding... GHC has implemented MPB by default (i.e. we deviate slightly from Haskell 98) since 6.8.1. The nice thing about the combination of removing MR and adopting MPB is that we retain a way to explicitly declare monomorphic bindings. These are monomorphic bindings: ~x = e x@_ = e or if you don't mind a strict binding: !x = e. The wiki points out that (x) = e would also be monomorphic, but arguably this is in poor taste since we expect (x) to mean the same as x everywhere. Cheers, Simon