I think Henning has a point regarding defining: o = fromString All these libraries that Edward mentions already ask the user to paste a lot of boilerplate at the top of their module consisting of various extensions and imports. Why not simply remove the `OverloadedString`s pragma from the boilerplate and replace it with `o = fromString` and get almost the exact same benefits? On Mon, Aug 26, 2013 at 10:10 AM, Henning Thielemann < schlepptop@henning-thielemann.de> wrote:
Am 26.08.2013 19:03, schrieb Gabriel Gonzalez:
May I propose an alternative solution? Why not just add a syntactic way
to selectively opt in or out of `OverloadedStrings` for certain string literals? It could be something as simple as Python's trick for prefixing string literals with a single character to either enable or disable the overloading:
example1 :: Int example1 = length "Non-overloaded string"
example2 :: Parser Int example2 = o"Overloaded string" *> pure 4
... but it doesn't have to be that specific solution. All that really matters is that it is syntactically lightweight.
This "opting in" already exists: Just put a space between o and the quotation mark and define "o = fromString". It's Haskell 98.
I would prefer that solution to all syntactic extension experiments.