Lennart:
There is no problem, [the meaning of numeric literals is] clearly specified by the report. (There is a problem with Hugs, it doesn't implement literals properly. Or has that ancient bug been fixed?)
Lennart is absolutely right, the report is quite unambiguous and there is (still) a bug in Hugs. If this bug were to be fixed (I wouldn't hold my breath), we'd promptly fall over a bunch of other infelicities in the implementation of floating point and friends. The Hugs documentation clearly states that you shouldn't use Hugs for numeric work - i.e., for work where the accuracy of non-integer arithmetic is an issue. Comments on the state of Hugs should be directed to hugs-bugs@haskell.org (and should ideally be accompanied by patches purporting to fix the problem). -- Alastair Reid