So...yeah...I've kind of lost my train of thought, but I think that the problem I've frequently had is that I want to use the names the prelude uses, but can't. :).
Back when Haskell 1.4 (or 98?) was being designed, I proposed that Haskell's rule that the Prelude is implicitly imported into every module should be dropped. Benefit: simpler language, easier to replace Prelude with your own. Cost: requires you to type 2 extra tokens in every module and to ask students to type it in without first giving them a full explanation of what it means. Didn't get anywhere. I'm wondering if that would help at all? [Possibly not. When I worked on Yale Haskell (which was written in Lisp), I cursed and swore at the Lisp hackers who seemed to have defined their own personal subset of Lisp in which every symbol meant something slightly different from what it meant in any one Lisp. That is, one of Haskell's goals was to create a common language for all lazy language research so it might be a mistake to make fragmentation easy.] -- Alastair