So what's wrong with 'import Prelude()'?
It's kinda cryptic. A reasonable way to describe the rule being followed when you write 'import Prelude()' is: "To not import the prelude, first import the Prelude." It has to be explained to people as a special rule. After all, if I see this: import Foo() I know I can delete it with no change to the program. Do that with an import Prelude and you probably get a warnign about ambiguous imports. So it's another rule you have to explain to people. The situation where this came up was in writing Embedded Domain Specific Langauges like Fran. Fran users didn't want to know about Haskell's module system. It seemed reasonable to ask them to write import Fran at the head of their program but asking them to not import something they've never heard of using cryptic syntax seems a bit much. Similarily, if teaching functional programming, one might want to start out with a beginners' Prelude which has no type classes, only Integer (or Rational?), omits foldl, map and friends (because you want to teach students how to write their own versions, etc.) First thing you have to do is explain something cryptic. "Well, see there's this thing called a Prelude which we're not going to discuss in this course and we don't want it so what we do is we import it to make it go away." -- Alastair Reid