[Haskell-cafe] Re: What does the Haskell type system do with"show (1+2)"?

[Brian Hulley]

Cale Gibbard wrote:
>> <Snip>
> So long as we're going to have a defaulting mechanism, it seems a bit
> odd to restrict it to Num, and to classes in the Prelude.

Instead of having literals such as 1 that could be Int, Integer, or Float 
etc, why not just have one Number type declared as something like:

data Number = NInt Int | NInteger Integer | NFloat Float | NDouble Double | 
NRational Integer Integer | NComplex Number Number

etc so that all numeric literals would just be translated by the compiler 
into a Number. Arithmetic ops would then not be overloaded but the compiler 
could hopefully optimize out the extra indirection caused by using Number 
instead of plain Int, Integer, etc.

Regards, Brian.