Hi Josef, Thanks for the thorough and thoughtful reply. You do make a number of good points, and if people in general think this is a good proposal, I don't want to be the one killing it. However, I have thought a bit more about what really bothers me about the proposal, and I think it is this. You say:
The other side of the coin is what to name the functions. For this proposal I chose the same names as their generalized counterparts. I can see why that worries people although I don't share that feeling. We have a module system whose purpose is (among other things) to handle names. It does so rather well, consider for instance Data.Map and Data.Set which I use extensively in my everyday programming. They have a lot of function names in common and which also clashes with Prelude names and other libraries. It's not a problem to have several functions having the same name. It's actually a feature which lessens the burden of remembering a ton of names and which shows that their intended semantics is, if not equal, then strongly related.
Yes. If it truly were the case that we were talking about different *functions* having the same name, I wouldn't be concerned. Data.Map and Data.Set are good examples. But here we are talking about reusing the name of a method, i.e. an already overloaded entity, as a function. That does bother me, for some reason. I guess one level of overloading too many for my taste. (Maybe my brain just cannot cope! ;-) I'd be equally concerned if someone suggested using well-established methods from, say, the Monad class for something else. Part of it is also that the fact that an entity belongs to a class notionally representing some mathematical structure implies a "moral obligation" that instances of that entity should conform to the structure, even if Haskell does not enforce this. Using such a name for something else breaks or at least weakens that conceptual link, which I think would be a pity. Sorry that I don't have time to give a more in-depth reply at this point. Best, /Henrik -- Henrik Nilsson School of Computer Science and Information Technology The University of Nottingham nhn@cs.nott.ac.uk This message has been checked for viruses but the contents of an attachment may still contain software viruses, which could damage your computer system: you are advised to perform your own checks. Email communications with the University of Nottingham may be monitored as permitted by UK legislation.