Alastair David Reid writes:

We don't want to make 2 copies of the same code though (one in the Prelude but not exported, one in the correct place and exported) because it leads to code maintenance problems. Suppose that toUpper had a bug in it - it'd be so easy to fix one copy and forget about the existence of the second.

How about making the Prelude export (and use) __prelude_toUpper; then Char would have toUpper = __prelude_toUpper

Another fix (the preferred fix) is to improve the Hugs compiler so that the code can have (almost) the same structure as in the report. We know how to do this (STG-Hugs had it) but it'll take a bit of time to figure out again exactly which changes are required because the special treatment of the Prelude is deeply wired into Hugs. (More precisely, it'll take me a bit of time to find the time to look through the relevant archives.)

Of course, that would be better. Carl Witty