[Haskell-cafe] Monomorphic local let bindings and GHCi

[Miran Lipovača]

Hi!

There have been proposals to abandon generalisation for local let bindings because 
  they make specifying and implementing the type system very complicated when 
extensions like multi parameter type classes, type functions and GADTs are taken 
into consideration.

I agree with what the paper says in general, I'm just interested/concerned as to 
how abandoning local let generealisation would affect GHCi. While we rarely rely 
on the polymorphism of functions defined in local let bindings, I think a lot of 
programmers rely on the polymorphism of functions that they define with let in 
GHCi. I have a feeling that GHCi would be a lot less useful if it didn't allow us 
to define functions that are polymorphic in it.

Also, what would the behavior be anyway? If we did

 > let f x = x

in GHCi and then inspected the type of f, what would GHCi report? Would it use 
defaulting and give us () -> ()? Or would it display a polymorphic type a -> a and 
then change that type to something monomorphic once we use f with some value? What 
if we defined several functions like this that called each other?

So I think that if local let generalisation is abandoned, let bindings in GHCi 
would somehow have to be modified to remain polymorphic.

Any thoughts?