[ghc-steering-committee] GHC 2020

[Eric Seidel]

On Sun, Aug 30, 2020, at 03:11, Joachim Breitner wrote:
> I wouldn’t worry about enabling the extension; you’d still have to
> actually write {..} to get the behavior, readers will at least know
> whether it is hard to tell where variables are abound.

I agree, but this is a concern that comes up often, so we should be prepared to address it.

> > at least consider adding OverloadedStrings and perhaps
> > OverloadedLists.
> 
> 
> I regularly write code where I use a library that only works nice if
> "foo" is monomorphic, because such strings are meant to be used in
> polymorphic contexts. With OverloadedStrings, you get ambiguity errors
> that you have to resolve with explicit type annotations. So
> unfortunately, that one probably can’t be on by default. Which is a
> shame, of course.

Interesting, I think I can count on one hand the number of times OverloadedStrings has caused an ambiguity error for me. What libraries do you use that are polymorphic in the string type?