Ian Lynagh wrote:
I'm not sure if defaulting actually makes this worse, but regardless, I think we should seriously consider removing defaulting anyway:
http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/haskell-prime/wiki/Defaulting#Proposal4-remo...
Oh, actually, I agree with that proposal to remove defaulting. Maybe we should try implementing that and see how much things break. I imagine most uses can be solved by, if nothing else, adding local functions with more-constrained types, a bit similar to the (^) change. I noticed that depending on the resolution of http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/haskell-prime/wiki/KindInference , we might have a different sort of defaulting that examines exactly a whole module (which could also make it harder for my cyclic-module proposal to avoid recompilation? not sure) If we remove defaulting and the monomorphism restriction *and* don't add any other per-module semantics, then we get the module system out of the way of the semantics, which would make me very happy! There are a few GHC extensions that are still unfortunately per-module -- e.g. OverlappingInstances perhaps ought to be a notation or pragma on a class, rather than affecting all classes that happen to be defined in the module. (Pragmas aren't supposed to have an effect if they're not recognized; but sometimes people put OverlappingInstances on a class not because they're planning to make any such instances, but to allow users to define such instances; in which case the class and stock instances really can compile even in compilers that don't support overlapping instances) -Isaac