Bernie Pope
I don't see a proposal to remove defaulting defaulting altogether on that page - has that been discussed already?
Defaulting is one wart I would be glad to be rid of.
I would also be happy if it was removed.
Me too, in some ways. But...
1) It makes teaching Haskell more difficult, because it is a special case mechanism. I would prefer consistency here.
Unfortunately, I suspect that teaching is _the_ major use-case for defaulting. Imagine, day one, lesson one, a student types Prelude> 1+2 into Hugs, and gets the response Unresolved overloading: Num a Huh? This is lesson one, and you already need to tell students about type classes and overloading, before you have even covered simple expressions fully? I am certain this is the reason why defaulting was introduced.
2) It makes source-to-source program transformations more difficult, as found in Hat etc.
Sure, I'd be glad to improve that. Removing defaults altogether would solve the problem for the average user. But power users like Duncan would like to _extend_ defaulting to work over GUI type classes, and that too seems a reasonable request to me. Does my proposal for revision of defaults allow that, and still make Hat-style transformation easier? Yes, I think so. Regards, Malcolm