I vote against this proposal.
On 11/17/07, Ian Lynagh
In my experience this would remove 99.9% of all defaulting (mostly where you write things like x^12 and 8^12), which means it's easier to get -Wall clean without having to put :: Int annotations everywhere.
I agree that is a benefit (making it easier to avoid warnings), but in my opinion it is a tiny benefit. I don't see any other benefits to this proposal. And I am strongly against making the standard library more complicated by adding multiple functions that do the same thing (^ and genericPower). The inverse proposal has the same benefit, and doesn't require a change to GHC: just add intPower to your own code, and use it wherever you want. If you are unhappy with the idea of using intPower, perhaps you understand why I'm unhappy with the prospect of having to use genericPower.