Functions for builtin operators (?)

[Colin Paul Adams]

>>>>> "Simon" == Simon Peyton-Jones <simonpj at microsoft.com> writes:

    Simon> sorry, got diverted by paper writing.

Well, I've got diverted by the dragonfly season starting, so i don't
suppose I shall look at this again until October.

    Simon>  GHC desugars Hsakell into Core, and it's Core that you are consuming in the ESC
    Simon> stuff. However, Core for an *overloaded* function contains
    Simon> dictionary applications and abstractions.  Furthermore,
    Simon> overloaded operators turn into selectors, which pick out a
    Simon> particular field from a dictionary.  See any description of
    Simon> how to compile type classes for examples of this.

    Simon> So here you've got something like (>) d x y where (>) is
    Simon> defined like this (>) (MkOrd _ _ gr _) = gr That is, (>)
    Simon> picks out the gr field from the dictionary.  So it's all
    Simon> very higher-order in reality.  And that is what is giving
    Simon> trouble to the ESC stuff. After all, what do we know about
    Simon> *all* implementations of (>) at *all* types? Not much!

    Simon> Dana and I did not explore much how to give a good
    Simon> treatment to overloaded functions.  I would not expect it
    Simon> to "just work".

    Simon> I hope this helps a bit

Thanks.

I feared it wasn't going to be easy. 
Maybe I'll think about it in October.
-- 
Colin Adams
Preston Lancashire