[Haskell-cafe] Binary constants in Haskell

[Don Stewart]

claus.reinke:
> >>>  From my point of view, the difference between 0b10111011 and
> >>> (bin[1,0,1,1,1,0,1,1]) is 22-10 that is 12 characters.
> 
> how about using ghc's new overloaded strings for this?
> 
>    "10111011"::Binary
> 
> there used to be a way to link to ghc head's docs, but 
> i can't find it right now. the test is 
> 
> http://darcs.haskell.org/testsuite/tests/ghc-regress/typecheck/should_compile/tc224.hs
> 
> and the xml docs would be
> 
> http://darcs.haskell.org/ghc/docs/users_guide/glasgow_exts.xml

Why not use a Num instance for Binary, with fromInteger :: Integer -> a,
Yielding,

    10111011 :: Binary

Overloaded numeric literals seem better here than strings :)

-- Don